
(jlass_ 
Book_ 



H')L\ 



^ Gj^ 



By bequest of * ^ 

William Lukens Shoemaker 



CRITICAL KIT-KATS. 



CRITICAL KIT-KATS 



EDMUND GOSSE 

AUTHOR OF "gossip IN A LIBRARY," "QUESTIONS 
AT ISSUE," ETC. 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1896 



0ift 
W. h. aboemaket 

r S '06 



Detjfcatfon 
To THOMAS HARDY 

Mr Bear Hardt^ 

Toil imll recollect^ J think — for we have 
often laughed over the little incident — how^ many 
years ago ^ you and /, having lost our way in the leafy 
jnazes of the borough of Bridport^ asked a grave 
young man our road to the railway -station. Not 
content with misdirecting us^ the scoundrel must 
needs officiously conduct us up terraced pathsy and 
between zvalls clustered with creepers^ until he had 
seen us fairly started on the highway that led out of 
the opposite end of the town. How angry we were 
when we found out that we had been duped, and 
hozv astonished I I asked you, bitterly, if this was 
the vaunted courtesy of your JVessex yokel. As we 
kicked our heels at last, much too late for the train, 
in the blank waiting-room, we speculated on the 



Dedication 



"psychology of the thing. Was Bridport^ above all 
other towns, the abode of inhospitable crime, or was 
the young man an outlaw, fiyi'^'ig from justice, and 
glad to revenge himself on the very prophet of his 
county ? Or, was it not rather to he believed, as 
your kind heart, grown philosophical, suggested, 
that the young man, shocking as his advice had 
proved, gave it in good faith, knowing no better ? 

At all events, we two go no more to Bridport, 
Perhaps, as your people say, ^^ Bridport is Bridport 
stilly It remains with us, at least, as a symbol 
for misleading criticism, and that dark young man 
as the very Zoilus of his parish. In sending you 
another book of mine — such a poor return, at hest^ 
for your beautiful sylvan stories — how can I but 
wonder whether my sign-board work may not after 
all be of the Bridport order ? What if every judg- 
ment in it but misleads and misdirects ? A terrible 
nightmare, under which my only consolation is that 
you, even if you find me a false guide, will extend to 
me the indulgence which finally determined that our 
solemn miscreant, that hot summer afternoon, could 
not have meant to deceive, but only ^^knew no better ^ 



Dedication vii 



^ake the little book^ then^for the sake of the com- 
rade ^ not of the critic. 'Take it as a landmark in that 
friendship, to me inestimably precious, which has 
now lasted more than twenty years^ and will continue, 
I hope and think, unbroken till one or other of us 
can enter into no further earthly relations, 

I am always y my dear Hardy, 

Tours sincerely, 

e. g. 



PREFACE 

In an age when studies multiply, and our shelves groan 
with books, it is not every interesting and original 
figure to whom the space of a full-length or even a half- 
length portrait can be spared. For the low comfortable 
rooms where people dined in the last century, there was 
invented the shorter and still less obtrusive picture called 
a Kit-Kat,* and some of our most skilful painters have 
delighted in this modest form of portraiture, which 
emphasises the head, yet does not quite exclude the hand 
of the sitter. I have ventured to borrow from the graphic 
art this title for my little volume, since these are con- 
densed portraits, each less than half-length, and each 
accommodated to suit limited leisure and a crowded space. 
They are essays in a class of literature which it is 
strange to find somewhat neglected in this country, 
since, if it can only be executed with tolerable skill, none 
should be more directly interesting and pleasing. We 
are familiar with pure criticism and with pure biography, 
but what I have here tried to produce is a combination 
* Or a Kit-Cat, for both forms are in use. 



X Preface 

of the two, the life illustrated by the work, the work 
relieved by the life. Such criticism as is here attempted 
is not of the polemical order ; the biography excludes 
that. We cease to be savage and caustic when we are 
acquainted with the inner existence of a man, for the 
relentlessness of satire is only possible to those who 
neither sympathise nor comprehend. What is here 
essayed is of the analytical, comparative, and descriptive 
order; it hopes to add something to historical knowledge 
and something to aesthetic appreciation. It aims, in 
short, at presenting a little gallery of contemporary kit- 
kats, modest in proportion, but large enough to show the 
head and the hand. 

Of the genesis of these essays, it may be sufficient to 
say that several of them originated in the fact that I was 
able to add something to the positive knowledge of a 
figure suddenly made the object of increased curiosity. 
In several cases, I have been aided by the family of the 
subject, or by persons in possession of facts not hitherto 
made public. In particular, in two instances, that 
eminent poet who for many years honoured me with his 
friendship, Robert Browning, laid upon me as a duty 
the publication of what I have written. What is here 
found, in matters of fact, regarding the Sonnets of his 
Wife and the incidents of the career of Bed does, comes 
with the authority and is presented at the desire of 



Preface xi 

Browning. I need not produce my credentials in each 
case, but I may be allowed to say that there is only one 
of these essays in which I have been able to add nothing, 
either from the report of others or from my own observa- 
tion, to biographical knowledge. In several, the personal 
impression is almost entirely my own or contributed to 
me from unprinted sources. 

If it should be suggested that these little studies leave 
much unsaid and are far from exhausting the qualities of 
their subjects, 1 can but put myself, while admitting the 
charge to the full, under the protection of the most 
genial of all great men of letters, and borrow what 
Lafontaine says in the immortal epilogue to the Contcs : 

Bornons ici cette carri^re : 

Les longs ouvrages me font peur ; 

Loin d'epuiser une mati^re, 

On n'en doit prendre que la fleur. 

That I have secured the fine flower of any of these 
delicate spirits is more than I dare hope, but to do so 
has at least been my aim and my design. 

London, February 1896. 



Of the following Essays, those on ** The Sonnets from 
the Portuguese^^ and " Thomas Lovell Beddoes" were 
originally printed as prefaces to editions of the poems, 
issued by Mr. J. M. Dent. For his kind permission 
to reprint them my thanks are due to him, as for 
similar courtesy to the proprietors of " The Fortnightly 
Review^* " The Contemporary Review^"* " The Neto 
Review,^* and " The Century Magazine^ All the 
Essays have been carefully revisea, and in several 
cases considerably enlarged. 



CONTENTS 



P'g' 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 






I 


Keats /■» 1894 . 






19 


Thomas Lovell Beddoes , 






. 29 


Edward FitxGtrald . , 






. 63 


IValt Whitman . , , 






93 


Count Lyof Tolstoi , , 






113 


Chmstina Rossetti , , 






. 133 


Lord De Tabley . 






163 


Toru Dutt 






. 197 


M. Jose- Maria de Heredia , 






213 


Walter Pater 






239 


Robert Louis Stevenson . 






. 273 



THE SONNETS 
FROM THE PORTUGUESE 



The Sonnets from the Portuauese 

o 

IT was in the second or 1850 edition of the Poems 
in two volumes that the SonmUs from the Portuguese 
were first given to the pubHc. The circumstances 
attending their composition have never been clearly 
related. Mr. Browning, however, eight years before 
his death, made a statement to a friend, with the 
understanding that at some future date, after his own 
decease, the story might be more widely told. The 
time seems to have arrived when there can be no 
possible indiscretion in recording a very pretty episode 
of literary history. 

During the months of their brief courtship, closing, 
as all the world knows, in the clandestine flight and 
romantic wedding of September 12, 1846, neither poet 
showed any verses to the other. Mr. Browning, in 
particular, had not the smallest notion that the cir- 
cumstances of their betrothal had led Miss Barrett 
into any artistic expression of feeling. As little did he 
suspect it during their honeymoon in Paris, or during 
their first crowded weeks in Italy. They settled, at 
length, in Pisa ; and being quitted by Mrs. Jamieson and 
her niece, in a very calm and happy mood the young 
couple took up each his or her separate literary work. 



Critical Kit-Kats 



Their custom was, Mr. Browning said, to write 
alone, and not to show each other what they had 
written. This was a rule which he sometimes broke 
through, but she never. He had the habit of working 
in a downstairs room, where theii meals were spread, 
while Mrs. Browning studied in a room on the floor 
above. One day, early in 1847, their breakfast being 
over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband 
stood at the window watching the street till the table 
should be cleared. He was presently aware of some 
one behind him, although the servant was gone. It 
was Mrs. Browning, who held him by the shoulder to 
prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same 
time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his 
coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he 
did not like it ; and then she fled again to her own 
room. 

Mr. Browning seated himself at the table, and 
unfolded the parcel. It contained the series of sonnets 
which have now become so illustrious. As he read, his 
emotion and delight may be conceived. Before he had 
finished it was impossible for him to restrain himself, 
and, regardless of his promise, he rushed upstairs, and 
stormed that guarded citadel. He was early conscious 
that these were treasures not to be kept from the 
world ; '* I dared not reserve to myself," he said, " the 
finest sonnets written in any language since Shake- 
speare's." But Mrs. Browning Vv'as very loth indeed 
to consent to the publication of what had been the very 
notes and chronicle of her betrothal. At length she 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 3 

was persuaded to permit her friend, Miss Mary Russell 
Mitford, to whom they had originally been sent in 
manuscript, to pass them through the press, although 
she absolutely declined to accede to Miss Mitford's 
suggestion that they should appear in one of the 
fashionable annuals of the day. Accordingly a small 
volume was printed entitled Sonnets \ by | E. B. B. \ 
Reading \ Not for Publication \ 1847 | , an octavo of 
47 P'-igcs. 

When it was determined to publish the sonnets in 
the volumes of 1850, the question of a title arose. 
The name which was ultimately chosen, Sonnets from 
the Portuguese^ was invented by Mr. Browning, as an 
ingenious device to veil the true authorship, and yet to 
suggest kinship with that beautiful lyric, called Catarina 
to Canioens, in which so similar a passion had been 
expressed. Long before he ever heard of these poems, 
Mr. Browning called his wife his "own little Portuguese," 
and so, when she proposed ** Sonnets translated from 
the Bosnian," he, catching at the happy thought of 
" translated," replied, " No, not Bosnian — that means 
nothing — but from the Portuguese ! They are Catarina's 
sonnets I " And so, in half a joke, half a conceit, the 
famous title was invented. 



The ps3^chological moment at which the Sonnets from 
the Portuguese were composed, was one of singular im- 
portance. Although she was in her forty-first 3'ear 



Critical Kit-Kats 



(according to some accounts, in her thirty-eighth), the 
genius of Elizabeth Barrett was but newly come to its 
maturity. In precocity of intelligence she had been so 
remarkable as to become a type of childish attainment, 
but as an artist she was very slow to develop. Her 
earliest writings were strictly imitative ; the volumes 
she published in her young womanhood were full of 
interesting passages, but crude and jejune to an extra- 
ordinary degree. Had Elizabeth Barrett died at the 
age of thirty-three,* that is to say immediately after the 
publication of The Seraphim^ she would scarcely live 
among the English poets. It is to a subsequent period, 
it is to the years between the loss of her brother 
Edward at Torquay and her marriage, that those poems 
belong which display her talent at their highest achiev- 
ment. The two volumes of 1844 lifted her by a 
bound to the highest place among the living poets of 
her country, and seated her by the side of Tennyson. 
These two, in the genial old age of Wordsworth, were 
left the sole obvious inheritors of his throne, for 
Robert Browning was still obscure save to a very few. 
The change that in those years preceding her be- 
trothal had come to Elizabeth Barrett was a purifying 
and crystallising one. She had always had fire, and 
she was to keep the coal burning on her tongue, like the 
prophet, until the end of her career. But in the early 
period, and again in the period of her decline, what 



* I take for granted that the Coxhoe date of her birth, March 6, 1806, 
must be the correct one. But the crux seems still unsettled. 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 5 

was lacking was light. Her style was turbid ; the poet 
was not Sappho, standing in sunlight on the cliff of 
Mitylcne, but Pythia, seated in the smoke and vapour 
of Delphi, tortured by the vehemence of her own 
utterance, torn by the message which she lacked the 
art to deliver. Critics are beginning to see now, and 
sorrowfully to admit, that what is causing the noble 
figure of Elizabeth Barrett to recede gradually from 
that front place in which Tennyson, for instance, and 
Keats hold their pre-eminence, is her turbidity. The 
best poetry may roll down violent places, but it remains 
as limpid as a trout-stream ; what is unfortunate about 
Mrs. Browning's is that it is constantly stained and 
clouded. 

But there was a period — we may roughly date it 
between 1842 and 1850 — when these radical faults 
affected her style least. It was then that she reached 
the zenith of her genius, and, by a strange and fortu- 
nate accident, it was then, also, that she attained her 
greatest sum of happiness and health. Of this highest 
period, the summit or peak was the short space during 
which Robert Browning visited her as her affianced 
lover, and it is not singular, perhaps, but it is at least 
very interesting and pleasing, to find her writings at 
that moment less affected than at any other time, before 
or afterwards, by the errors which beset her. 

In other words, the Sonnets from the Portuguese ^ al- 
though they are by no means of equal merit, reach at their 
best the highest art of which their author was capable, 
and if we did not possess them, we should be forced to 



Critical Kit-Kats 



form a considerably lower estimate of her possibilities 
as an artist than we now do. She seems in the very 
best of her work, outside the volumes of 1844, to be 
utterly indifferent to technical excellence. Even in 
those volumes we see that her laxity was absolutely 
inherent, and that she is always liable to imperfection 
and licence. But the Sonnets from the Portuguese prove 
that she could, at her purest, throw off these stains and 
blemishes, and cast her work in bronze, like a master. 
They show her to us at her very best, and they form the 
pinnacle of her edifice as an artistic constructor. Per- 
haps, and to some readers, they may be neither the 
most attractive nor the most amusing of her writings, 
but to the critic they are certainly the least imperfect. 



The natural bent of Elizabeth Barrett was certainly 
not to the sonnet. She was too dithyrambic, too 
tumultuous, to be willingly restrained within a rigid 
form of verse. She employed none other of the regular 
English metres, except blank verse, which she treated 
with a sort of defiant desperation, and terza rima, in 
which she successfully strangled her genius. Her 
lyrics are all of her own invention or adaptation, and 
they are commonly of a loose, wild form, fit to receive 
her chains of adverbial caprices and her tempestuous 
assonances. But her love of Shakespeare and Words- 
worth drove her to emulation, and once and again she 
over tost bind her ebullient melodies down to the strict 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 7 

mould of fourteen rhymed iambics. It is evident that 
the difficulties she encountered piqued her to return to 
the attack, for her occasional sonnets became more and 
more frequent. It is interesting to note that, as befitted 
so learned a student of the Italians, her sonnets, from 
the first, were accurately built on the Petrarchan model. 
We might have expected from her usual laxity of form 
an adherence to the Elizabethan quatorzain, or, at least, 
to some of those adaptations in which Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, and even Keats indulged. But Miss Barrett, 
throughout her career, was one of the most rigid of 
Petrarchans, and no fault can be found with the struc- 
ture of her octetts and sestetts. 

One of the earliest sonnets of her mature period was 
that entitled *' The Soul's Expression," which is so 
interesting as a revelation of her own consciousness 
of the difficulties which technical art presented to her, 
and so valuable an indication of the mode in which 
she approached the sonnet-form, that it may here be 
quoted : — 

With stammering lips and insufficient sound, 

I strive and struggle to deliver right 

That music of my nature ^ day and night 

With dream and thought and feeling, interwound^ 

And inly answering all the senses round 

With octaves of a mystic depth and height^ 

Which step out grandly to the infinite 

From the dark edges of the sensual ground ! 

This song of soul I struggle to out hear 

Through portals of the sense, sublime and zuhole^ 



Critical Kit-Kats 



And utter all myself into the air : 

But if I did it — as the thunder -roll 

Breaks its own cloud — my flesh would perish there^ 

Before that dread apocalypse of soul. 

Fine as this is, eminently true to her own mood, and 
singular for its self-knowledge, it cannot be said to 
promise for its writer any great felicity as a sonneteer. 
The perturbed imagery, the wild grammar, the lack of 
a clarified and discipHned conception of style are 
prominent in every line. Very much more successful, 
however, and plainly inspired by the study of Words- 
worth, is the famous sonnet, " On a Portrait by R. B. 
Hay don," and in the years that immediately followed 
her return from Torquay, Miss Barrett's sonnets came 
thicker and faster, with a steady increase in the power 
to give her own peculiar characteristics of expression 
to this unfamiliar instrument. But the Sonnets from 
the Portuguese went further still. The little harp or 
lyre she had laboriously taught herself to perform upon, 
had just become familiar to her fingers, when it was 
called upon to record emotions the most keen, and 
imaginations the most subtle, which had ever crossed 
the creative brain of its possessor. 

Great technical beauty, therefore, is the mark of 
these wonderful poems. Not merely are the rhym^es 
arranged with a rare science and with a precision which 
few other English poets have had the patience to pre- 
serve, but the tiresome faults of Miss Barrett's prosody, 
those little foxes which habitually spoil her grapes, are 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 9 

here marvellously absent. Her very ear, which some- 
times seemed so dull, with its " morning " and " inurn- 
ing," its "Bacchantes" and "grant us," here seems to 
be quickened and strung into acuteness. There is a 
marked absence, in the Somicts from the Portuguese^ of 
all slovenly false rhymes, of all careless half-meaningless 
locutions, of all practical jokes played upon the parts 
of speech. The cycle opens with a noble dignity, and 
it is, on the whole, preserved at that high ethical level 
of distinguished poetic utterance. 

Of sonnet-cycles in the English language, there are 
but very few which can even be mentioned in connec- 
tion with that which we are describing. In the Eliza- 
bethan age, many crowns woven of fourteen-petalled 
blossoms were laid at the feet of unknown ladies. The 
art which invested these groups of sonnets was mainly 
of a thin and conventional order. It would task the 
memory or the instinct of the best of English scholars 
to tell at sight whether a given sonnet came from the 
garland of Idea or of Fiikssa, of Delia or of Chloris. 
Two cycles in that age immensely surpassed all the 
rest, and we may safely say that the Amoretti of 
Spenser form a set of poems as much greater than 
those we have mentioned, as they are inferior to Shake- 
speare's. In later times, we have one or two deliberate 
sets of sonnets by Wor^'oworth, and since the days of 
Mrs. Browning, Rossetti's House of Life. In foreign 
poetry, it is natural to turn to the Sonetienkranz^ in 
which, in 1807, Goethe darkly celebrated his passion 
for Minna Herzlieb, the mysterious Ottilie of the 



ro Critical Kit-Kats 

Walilverwandtschaftcn. Among the five best or most 
striking prolonged poems in the sonnet-form which 
EngHsh hterature possesses, Miss Barrett's, however, 
must unquestionably be reckoned. No competent critic 
could put the languid sweetness and honeyed vagueness 
of Spenser's daisy-chain of quatorzains in a rank so 
high as these serried, nervous, and highly-developed 
poems must hold, while V\/'ordsworth, perfect as he 
constantly is in the evolution of a single sonnet, is 
scarcely to be applauded for his conduct of any such 
series of such poems, nor The River Diiddon or The 
Ecclesiastical Sonnets to be compared for vital interest 
with those v/e are considering. Miss Barrett, accord- 
ingly, is left, on this occasion, with but two com- 
petitors. Rossetti excels her by the volume and im- 
petus of his imagery, and by his voluptuous intrepidity, 
but she holds her own by the intense vivacity of her 
instinct and the sincerity of her picture of emotion 
Beside the immortal melodies of Shakespeare, hers may 
be counted voluble, harsh, and slight ; but even here, 
her sympathy with a universal passion, the freshness 
and poignancy with which she treats a mood that is not 
rare and almost sickly, not foreign to the common ex- 
perience of mankind, but eminently normal, direct, and 
obvious, give her a curious advantage. It is probable 
that the sonnets written by Shakespeare to his friend 
contain loveJier poetry and a style more perennially 
admirable, but those addressed by Elizabeth Barrett to 
her lover are hardly less exquisite to any of us, and to 
many of us are more wholesome and more intelligible. 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 1 1 



Sincerity, indeed, is the first gift in literature, and 
perhaps the most uncommon. It is not granted to more 
than a few to express in precise and direct language 
their most powerful emotional experiences. To those 
who, like Mary Magdalene, have loved much, the art is 
rarely given to define and differentiate their feelings. 
The attempt to render passion by artistic speech is com- 
monly void of success to a pathetic degree. Those who 
have desired, enjoyed, and suffered to the very edge of 
human capacit}^, put the musical instrument to their lips 
to try and tell us what they felt, and the result is all dis- 
cord and falsetto. There is no question that many of 
the coldest and most affected verses, such as we are apt 
to scorn for their tasteless weakness, must hide under- 
neath the white ash of their linguistic poverty a core of 
red hot passion. But the rare art of literary sincerity 
has not been granted to these inarticulate lovers, and 
what cost them so many tears affords us nothing but 
fatigue or ridicule. 

It is peculiarly true that women who are poets can or 
will but seldom take us truly into their confidence in this 
matter. A natural but unfortunate delicacy leads them 
to write of love so platonically or so obscurely that we 
cannot tell what it is they wish to communicate. Not to 
seem so unmaidenly as to address a man, they feign to 
be men themselves and languish at ihe ladies. We are 
as much interested and as much convinced as we are at 
the opera when broad-hipped cavaliers in silken tights 



12 Critical Kit-Kats 

dance with slightly shorter girls in skirts. It is a curious 
fact that the amount of love-poetry written by women, 
and openly addressed to men, is very scanty. Our 
poetesses write : 

/ made a posy for my Love 
Js fair as she is soft and fine^ 

and wonder that we are faintly interested. It should be 
" as tough as he is firm and strong," and then we might 
really be inclined to conclude that the ditty was inspired 
by experience or instinctive feeling. Lady Winchelsea's 
honest praises of her husband, Ephelia's couplets on 
that false J. G. who sailed away to Tangier and never 
came back again, the sonnets of the fair rope-maker of 
Lyons, Louise Labe, the tender, thrilling lyrics written 
three hundred years later by Marceline Desbordes-Val- 
more — these are almost the only poems in all literature 
which one remembers as dealing, in lucidity and sin- 
cerity alike, with the love of a man by a woman. 

But the keynote of Elizabeth Barrett as an artist was 
sincerity. It is this quality, with all that it implies, 
which holds together the edifice of her style, built of 
such incongruous materials that no less-tempered mortar 
could bind it into a compact whole. At no period of her 
literary life, even when she was too slavishly following 
obsolete or tasteless models, was she otherwise than 
sincere. She was not striving to produce an effect ; she 
was trying with all the effort of which her spirit was 
capable, to say exactly what was in her heart. When 
sorrow possessed her, her verse sobbed and wailed with 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 1 3 

impatient human stress, and when at last, wliilc she 
waited for Death to take her by the hair, it was Love 
instead who came, she poured forth the heart of a happy 
woman without stint or concealment. The typical in- 
stance of the former class is the poem called '* De Pro- 
fundis," written as soon after the drowning of her brother 
Edward as the shattered nerves and beaten brain per- 
mitted her to taste the solace of composition. It should 
be read, in spite of its comparative inferiority, in con- 
nection with the Sounds from tJie Portuguese^ for the 
power it reveals is the same ; it is the capacity, while 
feeling acutely and deeply, to find appropriate, sufficient, 
and yet unexaggerated expression for the emotion. This 
great neuropathic artist was a physician as well as a 
sufferer, and could count her pulses accurately through 
all the spasms of her anguish and her ecstasy. 

When, in 1866, Robert Browning published the first 
selection from his wife's poems, he arranged the pieces 
in such a way as to give unobtrusive emphasis to the 
connection between the Sonnets from the Portuguese zxiA 
two short lyrics. Even if he had not placed '* Question 
and Answer," and " Inclusions " immediately in front of 
the sonnet-cycle, we might have been justified in conjec- 
turing that they belonged to the same period and the 
same mood. The arrangement of the Sonnets is his- 
torical. They are not heaped together in accidental 
sequence, as Spenser's and Shakespeare's seem to be, 
but they move on from the first surprise of unexpected 
passion to the final complete resignation of soul and 
body in a rapture which is to be sanctified and heightened 



14 Critical Kit-Kats 

by death itself. It is therefore possible, I think, by 
careful examination of the text, to insert in the sequence 
of sonnets, at their obvious point of composition, the 
two lyrics I have just mentioned ; and for that purpose 
I will quote them here. 

Taking the Sonnets in our hands, we meet first with 
the record of the violent shock produced on the whole 
being of the solitary and fading recluse by the discovery 
that Love — laughing Love masquerading under the cowl 
of Death — has invaded her sequestered chamber. Then 
to amazement succeeds instinctive repulsion ; she shrinks 
back in a sort of horror, in her chilly twilight, from the 
boisterous entrance of so much heat and glow. But this 
quickly passes, also, submerged in the sense of her own 
unworthiness ; her hands are numb, her eyes blinded 
and dazed — what has this guest of kings to do with her, 
a mourner in the dust ? Then follows, in a crescent 
movement of emotion, the noble image of Electra, pour- 
ing her sepulchral urn and all its ashes at the feet of 
Love, ashes that blight and burn, an affection so morbid 
and vain that it may rather destroy than bless the heart 
which provokes the gift. It is at this moment, I think, 
between sonnets 5 and 6, that ''Question and Answer " 
should be read, repeating the same idea, but repeating 
it in a lower key, with less violence and perhaps a shade 
less conviction : 

Love you seek for, presupposes 
Summer heat and sunny glow. 

Tell me, do you find moss-roses 
Budding, blooming in the snow ? 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 15 

Snow might kill the rose-tree^ s root — 
Shake it quickly from your foot. 
Lest it harm you as you go. 

From the ivy where it dapples 

A grey ruin, stone by stone. 
Do you look for grapes or apples. 

Or for sad green leaves alone 1 
Pluck the leaves off, two or three — 
Keep them for morality 

When you shall be safe and gone. 

But above these flutterings of the captured heart the 
captor hangs enamoured and persistent, smiHng at the 
fiat which bids him begone : and the heart begins to 
thaw with the unreheved radiation. The poetess 
acknowledges that she feels that she will stand hence- 
forward in his shadow, that he has changed for her the 
face of all the world. Still, she dares not yield. The 
tide of her unworthiness flows up, and floods all the 
creeks of her being ; she can but hide her eyes, from 
which the tears are flowing, and bid him, if he will not 
go and leave her, if he will persist in standing there 
with eloquent eyes fixed upon her, to trample on the 
pale stuff" of her life, too dead to be taken to his arms. 
She is scarcely reasonable ; we feel her pulses reeling, 
her limbs failing, and in the next sonnet the wave 
recedes for the final forward rush. She will not pour 
her poison on to his Venice-glass, she will not love him, 
will not see him — and in the next line she is folded to 
his arms, murmuring, *' I love thee ... I love thee ! " 



1 6 Critical Kit-Kats 

From this point forward the sonnets play, in their 
exquisite masque, as if to celestial dance-music, with 
the wild thoughts and tremulous frolics of accepted love, 
with a pulse that ever sinks into more and more normal 
beat, with an ever steadier and deeper flush of the 
new-born life. And here, if the reader will lay down 
the book at the close of sonnet i8, he may interpolate 
the lovely lyric called " Inclusions ": 

Oh, wilt thou have my hand. Dear, to lie along in thine? 
As a little stone in a running stream, it seems to lie and pine. 
Now drop the poor pale hand. Dear, unfit to pledge with thine. 

Oh, wilt thou have my cheek. Dear, drawn closer to thine own ? 
My cheek is white, my cheek is worn, by many a tear run down. 
Now leave a little space. Dear, lest it should wet thine own. 

Oh, must thou have my soul, Dear, commifigled with thy soul? 
Red grows the cheek, and warm the hand; the part is in the 

whole : 
Nor hands nor cheeks keep separate, when soul is joined to soul. 

We may pursue no further, save in the divine words of 
the sonnets themselves, the record of this noble and 
exquisite *' marriage of true minds." But we may be 
thankful that the accredited chronicle of this episode in 
life and literature, lifed far out of any vagueness of 
conjecture or possibility of misconstruction, exists for 
us, distinguishing, illuminating, perfuming a great page 
of our national poetry. Many of the thoughts that 
enrich mankind and many of the purest flowers of the 
imagination had their roots, if the secrets of experience 



The Sonnets from the Portuguese 17 

were made known, in actions, in desires, which could 
not bear the light of day, in hot-beds smelling quite 
otherwise than of violet or swectbriar. But this cycle 
of admirable sonnets, one of the acknowledged glories 
of our literature, is built patently and unquestionably 
on the union in stainless harmony of two of the most 
distinguished spirits which our century has produced. 



KEATS IN 1894 



Keats in 1894 



Address ddli'vcred at Hampstead on occasion of the itnveiVmg tj t/it 
yimcrican MoKument, July i6, 1 8 94. 

It is with no small emotion that wc receive to-day, 
from the hands of his American admirers, a monu- 
ment inscrihed to the memory of Keats. Those of us 
who may be best acquainted with the history of the 
poet will not be surprised that you have convened us 
to the church of Hampstead, although it was not here 
that he was born, nor here that he died. Yet some 
who are present to-day may desire to be reminded why 
it is that when we think of Keats we think of Hamp- 
stead. It is in his twenty- first 3^ear, in i8i6, that we 
find the first record of his ascent of this historic 
eminence. He appears, then, on the brow of Hamp- 
stead Hill as the visitor, as the disciple, of Leigh 
Hunt, in his cottage in the Vale-of-Health, a cottage, 
so I am told, to this day the haunt of poets. He comes, 
an ardent lad, with great, flashing eyes, and heavy, 
golden curls, carrying in his hand a wreath of ivy for 
the brows of Mr. Hunt. Nearly eighty years ago, this 
pilgrimage of boyish enthusiasm — but a few months 
after Waterloo, the last rumblings of the long European 
wars still dying away in the distance. Our unhappy 



22 Critical Kit-Kats 

contest with that great, young republic, which you, 
Sir, so gracefully represent to-day, just over and done 
with. How long ago it seems, this, page of history 1 
How dusty and shadowy ; and how fresh and near, 
across the face of it, the visit of the boyish poet to his 
friend and master on the hill of Hampstead I 

Such, at all events, was the earliest appearance of 
Keats in this place, and here the " prosperous open- 
ing " of his poetical career was made. Here he first 
met Shelley, Hay don, and perhaps Wordsworth. 
Hence, in 1817, from under these pleasant trees and 
the " leafy luxury " of the Vale-of-Health his earliest 
volume was sent forth to the world. Here, in lodgings 
of his own in Well Walk, he settled in the same sum- 
mer, that he might devote himself to the composition 
of Endymion. Here his best friends clustered round 
him — Bailey and Cowden Clarke, Dilke and Armitage 
Brown, and Reynolds. Here it was that, in the 
autumn of 1818, he met at Wentworth Place that brisk 
and shapely lady whose fascination was to make the 
cup of his sorrows overflow ; hence it was, too, that 
on the 18th of September, 1820, he started for Italy, a 
dying man. All of Keats that is vivid and intelligent, 
all that is truly characteristic of his genius and his 
vitality, is centred around Hampstead, and you, his 
latest Western friends, have shown a fine instinct in 
bringing here, and not elsewhere, the gifts and tributes 
of your love. 

If we find it easy to justify the locality which you 
have chosen for your monument to Keats, it is surely not 



Keats in 1894 23 

less easy, altliough more serious and more elaborate, 
to bring forward reasons for tbe existence of tbat 
monument itself. In the first place, that you should 
so piously have prepared, and that we so eagerly, and 
so unanimously accept, a marble effigy of Keats — 
what does it signify, if not that we and and you alike 
acknowledge the fame that it represents to be durable, 
stimulating, and exalted ? For, consider with me for 
a moment how singularly unattached is the reputation 
of this, our Ilampstcad poet. It rests upon no privilege 
of birth, no " stake in the country," as we say ; it is 
fostered by no alliance of powerful friends, or wide 
circle of personal influences ; no one living to-day has 
seen Keats, or artificially preserves his memory for any 
private purpose. In all but verse his name was, as he 
said, " writ in water." He is identified with no pro- 
gression of ideas, no religious, or political, or social 
propaganda. He is either a poet, or absolutely nothing — 
we withdraw the poetical elements from our conception 
of him; and what is left? The palest phantom of a 
livery-stablekeeper's son, an unsuccessful medical 
student, an ineffectual, consumptive lad, who died in 
obscurity, more than seventy years ago. 

You will forgive me for reminding you of this 
absence of all secondary qualities, of all outer accom- 
plishments of life, in the career of that great man, 
whom we celebrate to-day, because, in so doing, I 
exalt the one primary quality which raised him among 
the principalities and powers of the human race, and 
makes our celebration of him to-day perfectly rational 



24 Critical Kit-Kats 

and explicable to all instructed men and women. It 
is not every one who appreciates poetry. It may be 
that such appreciation is really a somewhat rare and 
sequestered gift. But all practical men can under- 
stand that honour is due to those who have performed 
a difficult and noble task with superlative distinction. 
We may be no politicians, but we can comprehend the 
enthusiasm excited by a consummate statesman. Be it 
a sport or a profession, an art or a discovery, all men 
and women can 'acquiesce in the praise which is due to 
him who has exercised it the best out of a thousand who 
have attempted it. This, then, would be your answer 
to any who should question the propriety of your zeal 
or of our gratitude to-day. We are honouring John 
Keats, we should reply in unison, because he did with 
superlative charm and skill a thing which mankind has 
agreed to include among the noblest and most elevated 
occupations of the human intelligence. We honour, in 
the lad vAio passed so long unobserved among the 
inhabitants of Hampstead, a poet, and nothing but a 
poet, but one of the very greatest poets that the modern 
world has seen. 

The Professor of Poetry at Oxford reminds me that 
Tennyson was more than once heard to assert that 
Keats, had his life been prolonged, would have been 
our greatest poet since Milton. This conviction is one 
nov\^ open to discussion, of course, but fit to be pro- 
pounded in any assemblage of competent judges. It 
may be stated, at least, and yet the skies not fall upon 
our heads. Fifty years ago to have made such a pro- 



Keats in 1894 25 



position in public would have been tbougbt ridiculous, 
and sixty years ago almost wicked. When the late 
Lord Houghton — a name so dear to many present, a 
name never to be mentioned without sympathy in any 
collection of literary persons — when Monckton Milnes, 
as in 1848 he still was, published his delightful life of 
Keats, it was widely looked upon as a rash and fantastic 
act to concentrate so much attention on so imperfect a 
career. But all that is over now. Keats lives, as he 
modestly assured his friends would be the case, among 
the English poets. Nor among them, merely, but in 
the first rank of them — among the very few of whom 
we instinctively think whenever the characteristic verse- 
men of our race are spoken of. 

To what does he owe his pre-eminence — he, the 
boy in this assemblage of strong men and venerable 
greybeards, he who had ceased to sing at an age when 
most of them were still practising their prosodical 
scales ? To answer this adequately would take us 
much too far afield for a short address, the object of 
which is simply to acknowledge with decency your 
amiable gift. But some brief answer I must essay to 
make. Originality of poetic style was not, it seems 
to me, the predominant characteristic of Keats. It 
might have come with ripening years, but it cannot 
be at all certain that it would. It never came to Pope 
or to Lamar tine, to Virgil or to Tennyson. It has 
come to poets infinitely the inferiors of these, infinitely 
the inferiors of Keats. Those who strive after direct 
originality forget that to be unlike those who have 



26 Critical Kit-Kats 

preceded us, in all the forms and methods of expression, 
is not by any means certainly to be either felicitous or 
distinguished. There is hardly any excellent feature 
in the poetry of Keats which is not superficially the 
feature of some well-recognised master of an age pre- 
cedent to his own. He boldly takes down, as from 
some wardrobe of beautiful and diverse raiment, the 
dress of Spenser, of Milton, of Homer, of Ariosto, of 
Fletcher, and wears each in turn, thrown over shoulders 
which completely change its whole appearance and pro- 
portion. But, if he makes use of modes which are 
already familiar to us, in their broad outlines, as the 
modes invented by earlier masters, it is mainly because 
his temperament was one which imperatively led him 
to select the best of all possible forms of expression. 
His excursions into other people's provinces were 
always undertaken with a view to the annexation of 
the richest and most fertile acres. 

It is comparatively vain to speculate as to the future 
of a man whose work was all done between the ages 
of nineteen and four-and-twenty. Yet I think we may 
see that what Keats was rapidly progressing towards, 
until the moment when his health gave way, was a 
crystallisation into one fused and perfect style of all 
the best elements of the poetry of the ages. When 
we think of Byron, we see that he would probably 
have become absorbed in the duties of the ruler of a 
nation ; in Shelley, we conjecture that all was being 
merged in the politician and the humanitarian ; but in 
Keats poetry was ever steadily and exclusively ascen- 



Keats in 1894 27 

dant. Shall I say what will startle you if I confess 
that I sometimes fancy that we lost in the author of the 
five great odes the most masterful capacity for poetic 
expression which the world has ever seen ? 

Be this as it may, without vain speculation we may 
agree that we possess even in this fragment of work, 
in this truncated performance, one of the most splendid 
inheritances of English literature. ** I have loved the 
principle of beauty in all things," Keats most truly said, 
** the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things." It 
is this passion for intellectual beauty — less disturbed 
perhaps by distracting aims in him than in any other 
WTiter of all time — that sets the crown on our conception 
of his poetry. When he set out upon his mission, as a 
boy of twenty, he entered that " Chamber of Maiden 
Thought " of which he speaks to Reynolds, where he 
became intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. 

Many of his warmest admirers seem to have gone 
with him no further, to have stayed there among the 
rich colours and the Lydian melodies and the enchant- 
ing fresh perfumes. But the real Keats evades them if 
they pass no further. He had already risen to graver 
and austerer things, he had already bowed his shoulders 
under the burden of the mystery. But even in those 
darker galleries and up those harsher stairs he took 
one lamp with him, the light of harmonious thought. 
The profound and exquisite melanchol}^ of his latest 
verse is permeated with this conception of the loftiest 
beauty as the only consolation in our jarring and be- 
wildered world : 



Critical Kit-Kats 



Beauty is truth ^ truth beauty— that is all 
Te know on earthy and all ye need to know. 

And now, Sir, we turn again to you and to the gracious 
gift you bring us. In one of his gay moods Keats 
wrote to his brother George in Kentucky : " If I had a 
prayer to make, it should be that one of your children 
should be the first American poet." That wish was not 
realised; the 'Mittle child o' the western wild" remained, 
I believe, resolutely neglectful of the lyre its uncle 
offered to it. But the prophecies of great poets are 
fulfilled in divers ways, and in a broader sense all the 
recent poets of America are of Keats's kith and kin. 
Not one but has felt his influence ; not one but has 
been swayed by his passion for the ethereal beauty ; 
not one but is proud to recognise his authority and 
dignity. 

The ceremony of to-day, so touching and so signifi- 
cant, is really, therefore, the pilgrimage of long-exiled 
children to what was once the home of their father. 



THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 



IN a letter written to Kelsall in 1824, Beddoes makes 
the following remarks on the poetical situation of the 
moment: 

" The disappearance of Shelley from the world seems, 
like the tropical setting of that luminary to which his 
poetical genius can alone be compared, with reference to 
the companions of his day, to have been followed by 
instant darkness and owl-season ; whether the voci- 
ferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender full-faced 
L. E. L. the milk-and-watery moon of our darkness, are 
questions for the astrologers ; if I were the literary 
weather-guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate 
fog, rain, blight in due succession for its dullard 
months." 

When these words were written, the death of B3Ton 
four months previously had closed, for English readers, 
a romantic phase of our national verse. If Keats, 
Shelley, and Byron, however, were gone, it maybe ob- 
jected that all the other great poets of the age survived. 
This is true in a physical sense, but how many of them 
were still composing verse of any brilliant merit ? Not 



32 Critical Kit-Kats 

Coleridge, long ago stricken dumb to verse ; not Words- 
worth, prosing on without the stimulus of inspiration ; 
even Moore or Southey were vocal no longer ; Campbell 
and Scott had practically taken farewell of the Muse. 
English poetry had been in blossom from 1795 to 1820 
but the marvellous bloom was over, and the petals were 
scattered on the grass. 

The subject of this memoir began to write at the 
very moment of complete exhaustion, when the age was 
dazzled with excess of genius, and when the nation was 
taking breath for a fresh burst of song. He had the 
misfortune to be a young man when Keats and Shelley 
were just dead, and when Tennyson and Browning were 
schoolbo3^s. In the v/ords which have just been quoted 
he has given a humorous view of the time, which shows 
that, at the age of twenty-one, he had grasped its char- 
acteristics. Among his exact contemporaries there was 
no one, except Praed, who was some months his senior, 
who inherited anything like genius. Beddoes was four 
years younger than Hood, two years older than Eliza- 
beth Barrett. No other name has survived worthy of 
being even named beside his as a poet, except Macaulay, 
with whom he has nothing in common. He was early 
dissuaded from the practice of verse, and all that he has 
left, which is of any sterling value, was composed 
between 1 82 1, when he pubhshed The Improvisatore, • 
and 1826, when he practically finished DeatK s Jest-Book 
He belongs to those five years of exhaustion and me- 
diocrity, and the effect of having to write at such a 
period, there can be no doubt, dwarfed, restrained, and 



Thomas Lovell Bcddoes 33 

finally quenched his poetical faculty. It is not saying 
much, yet it is mere justice to insist, that Beddoes was, 
during those five years, the most interesting talent en- 
gaged in writing English verse. 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Rodney Place, 
Clifton, on the 20th of July, 1803. He was the eldest 
son of a celebrated physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, 
who died in 1809, and left his son to the guardianship 
of Davies Giddy, afterwards known as Sir Davies Gil- 
bert, P.R.S., who lived for thirty 3^ears longer. The 
boy's mother, Anna, was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, 
the novelist. He was educated at Bath Grammar 
School and at the Charterhouse, where, as early as 1 8 1 7, 
he began to write verses. Of his character at school, 
where he showed signs at once of that eccentricity and 
independence of manners which were to distinguish him 
through life, a schoolfellow, Mr. C. D. Bevan, has pre- 
served a very entertaining account, from which this 
short extract may be given : 

*'He knew Shakespeare well when I first saw him, 
and during his stay at the Charterhouse made himself 
master of all the best English dramatists, from Shake- 
speare's time, or before it, to the plays of the day. He 
liked acting, and was a good judge of it, and used to 
give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular 
actors, particularly of Kean and Macready. Though his 
voice w^as harsh and his enunciation offensively con- 

c 



34 Critical Kit-Kats 

ceited, he read with so much propriety of expression 
and manner that I was always glad to listen : even when 
I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, or his 
enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, 
caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation re- 
quired. One pla}^ in particular, Marlow's tragedy of 
Dr. Fausius^ excited my admiration, and was fixed on 
my memory in this way." 

At school he came under the influence of Fielding, 
and wrote a novel, entitled Cynthio and Bugboo^ the loss 
of which we need scarcely deplore, as, according to the 
same authority, it was marked by " all the coarseness, 
little of the wit, and none of the truth of his original." 
The fragments of his schoolboy verse, in particular the 
rhapsody of Alfarahi^ display a very singular adroitness 
in the manufacture of easy blank verse, and precocious 
tendency to a species of mocking metaphysics, both 
equally unlike a child. In July, 1 8 19, while still at 
Charterhouse, a sonnet of his was printed in the Morn- 
ing Post. On the 1st of May, 1820, Beddoes proceeded 
to Oxford, and was entered a commoner at Pembroke, 
which had been his father's college. 

Although he had been a forward boy at school, Bed- 
does passed through Oxford without any academic dis- 
tinction. He was a freshman of eighteen when, in 1821, 
he published his first volume, The Improvisatorey of 
which he afterwards carefully tried to destroy ;» every 
copy. In 1822 he published, as another thin pamphlet, 
The Brides^ Tragedy^ which has also become extremely 
rare. These two httie Dooks, the work of an under- 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 35 

graduate less than twenty years of age, are the only 
ones which Beddoes ever published. The remainder of 
his writings, whether lyrical or dramatic, were issued 
posthumously, not less than thirty years later. The 
Brides* Tragedy attracted some notice in literary circles ; 
it secured for the young Oxford poet the friendship of a 
man much older than himself, but of kindred tastes, 
Bryan Waller Procter. The dramatic poems of " Barry 
Cornwall," of which Mirandola was then the latest, 
had been appearing in rapid succession, and their 
amiable author was a person of considerable influence. 
It was Procter who, in 1823, introduced Beddoes to 
Thomas Forbes Kelsall, a young lawyer practising at 
Southampton. It had been thought well that Beddoes, 
who was sadly behind-hand with his studies, should go 
down to this quiet town to read for his bachelor's degree, 
and he remained at Southampton for some months, in 
great intimacy with Kelsall, and forming no other 
acquaintance. 

While he was at Southampton, Beddoes wrote a 
great deal of desultory verse, almost all of a dramatic 
order ; to this period belong The Second Brother and 
Torrismond, among other fragments. Already he was 
seized with that inability to finish, that lack of an 
organic principle of poetical composition, which were to 
prevent him from mounting to those heights of which 
his facility and brilliancy seem to promise him an easy 
ascent. The death of Shelley appears to have drawn 
his attention to the genius of that writer, by which he 
was instantly fascinated, and, as it were, absorbed. 



36 Critical Kit-Kats 

Outside the small circle of Shelley's personal friends, 
Beddoes was perhaps the first to appreciate the magni- 
tude of his merit, as he was certainly the earliest to 
imitate Shelley's lyrical work. His letters to Procter 
and Kelsall are full of evidence of his over-mastering 
passion for Shelley, and it was to Beddoes, in the first 
instance, that the publication of that writer's Posthu- 
mous Poems was due. In the winter of 1823 Beddoes 
started a subscription with his two friends, and cor- 
responded with John Hunt on the subject. They 
promised to take 250 copies, but Hunt said that Mrs. 
Shelley ought to have some profit. This seemed 
hardly fair to Beddoes ; " for the twinkling of this very 
distant chance we, three poor honest admirers of 
Shelley's poetry, are certainly to pay." At this time 
Beddoes was writing two romantic dramas. Lovers 
Arrow Poisoned and The Last Man, both founded on 
the tragic model of Webster, Cyril Tourneur, and 
Middleton. Of these plays not very much was ever 
written, and still less is now in existence. Of The 
Last Man he writes, in February 1824: ''There are 
now three first acts in my drawer. When I have got 
two more, I shall stitch them together, and stick the 
sign of a fellow tweedHng a mask in his fingers, with 
* good entertainment for man and ass ' understood." 

The year 1824 he spent in London, Oxford, and 
Bristol. Already his eccentric shyness had grown upon 
him. He writes to Kelsall from his lodgings in 
Devereux Court, Temple, March 29, 1824: 

** Being a little shy, and not a little proud perhaps. 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 37 

I have held back and never made the first step towards 
discovering my residence or existence to any of my 
family friends [in London]. In consequence I have 
lived in a deserted state, which I could hardly bear 
much longer without sinking into that despondency on 
the brink of which I have sate so long. Your cheerful 
presence at times (could we not mess together occasion- 
ally ?) would set me up a good deal, but perhaps you 
had better not draw my heavy company on 3^our 

head I met an intelligent man who had lived at 

Hampstead, seen Keats, and was read in his and the 
poems of Shelley. On my mentioning the former by 
accident to him, he complimented me on my similarity 
of countenance ; he did not think much of K.'s genius, 
and therefore did not say it insincerely or sycophantic- 
ally. The same was said by Procter and Taylor 
before." 

Mrs. Procter, who had known both poets, made the 
same remark about Beddoes to myself; but she added 
that she never sav/ in the latter the extraordinary look 
of inspiration which was occasionally to be detected in 
the great eyes of Keats. 

In the summer of 1824 Beddoes was hastily called 
to Florence by the illness of his mother, who was living 
there. She died before he could reach her, but he 
spent some weeks there, saw Walter Savage Landor, 
and then returned to Clifton in charge of his sisters. 
In October of the same 3'ear he began to study 
German, a language then but little known in this 
country. He attacked it languidly at first, then 



38 Critical Kit-Kats 

with ever-increasing eagerness and zest. But the 
Elizabethan drama was still his principal delight, and 
he studied it, even in its least illustrious forms, with 
extraordinary closeness and gusto. Writing to 
Kelsall from Clifton (January 11, 1825), he remarks, 
apropos of a revival of The Fatal Dowry of Massinger : 

" Say what you will, I am convinced the man who 
is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling 
fellow — no creeper into worm-holes — no reviver even, 
however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. 
Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster, &c., are better 
dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contem- 
porary of ours, but they are ghosts — the worm is in their 
pages — and we want to see something that our great- 
grandsires did not know. With the greatest reverence 
for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we 
had better beget than revive, attempt to give the literature 
of this age an idiosyncracy and spirit of its own, and 
only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with. Just 
now the drama is a haunted ruin. I am glad that you 
are awakening to a sense of Darley. He must have 
no little perseverance to have gone through so much 
of that play ; it will perchance be the first star of a 
new day." 

The result of so much meditation on the drama 
was the composition of more fragments. The Second 
Brother^ Torrismond, and The Last Man occupied 
Beddoes during the winter and spring of 1824-5. But 
none of these approached completion. He then planned 
the publication of a volume of lyrics, to be entitled 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 39 

Oufidaua, or Effusions^ amorous , pathetic ^ and fantastical^ 
which was to include most of the miscellaneous verses 
reprinted in 1890, and others which are now lost. 
On the 25th of May, 1825, Beddoes took an ordinary 
bachelor's degree at Oxford. He writes to Kclsall 
from Pembroke College, on the 8th of June, announcing 
for the first time the most celebrated of his writings ; 

" Oxford is the most indolent place on earth. I have 
fairly done nothing in the world but read a play or two 
of Schiller, ^schylus and Euripides — you I suppose 
read German now as fast as English. I do not finish 
that 2nd Brother you saw but am thinking of a very 
Gothic-styled tragedy for which I have a jewel of a 
name : 

Death's Jestbook — ■ 

of course no one will ever read it. Mr. Milman (our 
poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable 
here by denouncing me as one of a * villainous school.' 
I wish him another son." 

He now suddenly determined to abandon literature, 
which had suggested itself to him as a profession, and 
take up the study of medicine. We find him, there- 
fore, on the 19th of July, 1825, at Hamburg, "sitting 
on a horse-hair sofa, looking over the Elbe, with his 
meerschaum at his side, full of Grave, and abundantly 
prosaic. To-morrow, according to the prophecies of 
the diligence, he will set out for Hanover, and by the 
end of this week mein Herr Thomas will probably be a 
Doctor of the University of Gottingen " This, however, 



40 Critical Kit-Kats 

was rather premature. He did not become a doctor 
until much later. It is important to obser\^e that the 
exodus to Germany thus casually and nonchalantly 
taken involved nothing less, as it proved, than a com- 
plete alteration in all his habits. Except for very few 
and brief visits, he did not return to England for the 
rest of his life, and he so completely adopted the lan- 
guage and thoughts of a German student as almost to 
cease to be an Englishman. 

At Gottingen the celebrated man of science, Prof. 
Blumenbach, became the most intimate friend of 
Beddoes. The latter threw himself with the utmost 
ardour into the study of physiology and medicine. He 
did not, however, at first abandon his design of becom- 
ing an English dramatic poet. He writes to Kelsall 
(Dec. 4, 1825): 

" I am perhaps somewhat independent, and have a 
competence adequate to my philosophical desires. There 
are reasons why I should reject too much practice if it 
did intrude ; really I am much more likely to remain a 
patientless physician. And now I will end this un- 
necessary subject, by telling you that DeatKs Jestbook 
goes on like the tortoise, slow and sure ; I think it will 
be entertaining, very unamiable, and utterly unpopular. 
Very likely it may be finished in the spring or autumn." 

His misanthropy, for it almost deserves so harsh a 
name, grew upon him. " I feel myself," he wrote, ^*in 
a measure alone in the world and likely to remain so, 
for, from the experiments I have made, I fear I am a 
non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable person, 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 41 

so that I must make sure of my own respect, and 
occupy that part of the brain which should be employed 
in imaginative attachments in the pursuit of immaterial 
and unchanging good." In April, 1826, Death's Jest- 
book is still lying ** like a snow-ball, and I give it a kick 
every now and then, out of mere scorn and ill-humour ; 
the 4th act, and I may say the 5th, are more than half 
done, so that at last it will be a perfect mouse, but such 
doggerell ! " None the less did he anticipate that the 
poem would come *' like an electric shock among the 
small critics." In October, 1826, it is "done and done 
for, its limbs being as scattered and unconnected as 
those of the old gentleman whom Medea minced and 
boiled young. I have tried 20 times at least to copy 
it fair." He intended at this time to send the MS. to 
Kelsall and Procter to be seen through the press, but 
he delayed until he could bring the poem himself to 
London. 

His monotonous existence in Gottingen was broken 
in the spring of 1 828 by a visit of a few days to 
England, where he took his degree of M.A. at Oxford, 
and hurried back to Germany. Meanwhile he had left 
Death's Jesthook with Procter and Kelsall for publica- 
tion, but they decided that it must be "revised and 
improved." In his fifth year in Germany, " having 
already been at Gottingen the time which it is allowed 
for any student to remain there," he transferred his 
residence to Wurzburg, in Bavaria ; " a very clever 
professor of medicine and capital midwife brought me 
here, and a princely hospital." In 1831 there was 



42 Critical Kit-Kats 

again some abortive talk of publishing DeatKs Jesthook. 
About this time Beddoes becam.e more and more 
affected by opinions of the extreme radical order ; he 
subscribed towards " the support of candidates who 
were professed supporters of the Reform Bill/' and he 
began to affect a warm personal interest in certain 
revolutionary Poles who had taken up their abode in 
Wiirzburg. He continued his medical studies with 
great thoroughness, and in the summ^er of 1832 he 
took his degree of doctor of medicine in the University, 
being now in his thirtieth year. He was more and 
more mixed up in political intrigue, and on the 25 th of 
September, 1832, he somewhat obscurely says : 

** The absurdity of the King of Bavaria has cost me 
a good deal, as I was obliged to oppose every possible 
measure to the arbitrary illegality of his conduct, more 
for the sake of future objects of his petty royal malice 
than my own, of course in vain." 

He was soon after obliged to fly, " banished by that 
ingenious Jackanapes of Bavaria," in common with 
several of his distinguished Wiirzburg friends. He 
took refuge, first in Strassburg, then in Zurich. He 
brought with him to Switzerland a considerable repu- 
tation as a physiologist, for Blumenbach, in a testi- 
monial which exists, calls him the best pupil he ever 
had. It appears that he now assumed, what he after- 
wards dropped, the degree of M.D., and had some 
practice as a physician in the town of Zurich. In 1835 
the surgeon Schoenlien proposed Beddoes to the 
medical faculty of the University as professor of Com- 



Thomas Lovcll Beddoes 43 

parative Anatomy, and the latter unanimously seconded 
him. His election, however, was not ratified, accord- 
ing to one of his letters, for political reasons, according 
to another because he was found to be ineligible, from 
his having published nothing of a medical character. 
He spent several healthy and tolerably happy years in 
Zurich, "what," he says in March, 1837, ** with a 
careless temper and the pleasant translunary moods I 
walk and row myself into upon the lakes and over the 
Alps of Switzerland ; " and once more, as he quaintly 
put it, he began " to brew small ale out of the water 
of the fountain of the horse's foot," working again on 
the revision of Death's Jcstbook, He also began to 
prepare for the press a collection of his narrative and 
lyrical poems, to be called The Ivory Gate. In 1838 he 
was engaged in translating Grainger's work on the 
Spinal Cord into German. 

He had spent six years at Zurich, and was beginning 
to feel that city to have become his settled home, when, 
on the 8th of September, 1839, a political catastrophe 
destroyed his peace of mind. A mob of six thousand 
peasants, " half of them unarmed, and the other half 
armed with sc3'thes, dung-forks and poles, led on by a 
mad fanatic and aided by some traitors in the cabinet, 
and many in the town," stormed Zurich, and upset the 
liberal government of the canton. Beddoes observed 
the riot from a window, and witnessed the murder of 
the minister Hegetschweiler, who was one of his best 
friends. He wrote : " In consequence of this state of 
things, in which neither property nor person is secure, 



44 Critical Kit-Kats 

I shall find it necessary to give up my present resi- 
dence entirely. Indeed, the dispersion of my friends 
and acquaintance, all of whom belonged to the liberal 
party, renders it nearly impossible for me to remain 
longer here." He loitered on, however, until March, 
1840, when his life was threatened by the insurgents, 
and he was helped to fly from Zurich in secret by a 
former leader of the liberal party, whom he had be- 
friended, a man of the name of Jasper. 

It is probable that the seven years Beddoes spent at 
Zurich formed the happiest portion of his life. He was 
never to experience tranquillity again. The next few 
years were spent in what seems an aimless wandering 
through the length and breadth of Central Europe. Little 
is known of his history from this time forward. In 1 841 
he was in Berlin, where he formed an acquaintanceship 
with a young Dr. Frey, who remained his intimate friend 
to the last. In 1842 he made a brief visit to England. 
In 1843 he went to Baden in Aargau, where he seems 
to have stored his library, and, so far as Beddoes 
henceforth could be said to have a home, that home 
was in this little town of Northern Switzerland, not 
far from Zurich. He spent the winter of 1844 ^t 
Giessen, attracted thither by Liebig and his famous 
school of chemistry, after having lodged through the 
summer and autumn at Basel, Strassburg, Mannheim, 
Mainz, and Frankfurt in succession. At Giessen a 
little of the poetic fervour returned to him, and it was 
here that he wrote " The Swallow leaves her Nest," and 
" In Lover's Ear a wild Voice cried." But most of his 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 45 

verse now was written in German. He sa3.s (Nov. 
13, 1844): "Sometimes to amuse myself 1 write a 
German lyric or epigram, right scurrilous, many of 
which have appeared in the Swiss and German papers, 
and some day or other I shall have them collected and 
printed for fun." It is needless to say that he never 
issued this collection, and the German poems, doubtless 
signed with a pseudonym or else anonymous, have 
never been traced. 

In August, 1846, he came to England for a consider- 
able stay. Intending to remain six weeks, he loitered 
on for ten months. His friends, few of whom had 
seen him for more than twenty years, found him 
altered beyond all recognition. He had become ex- 
tremely rough and cynical in speech, and eccentric in 
manners. I am informed by a member of his family 
that he arrived at the residence of one of his relations, 
Cheney Longville, near Ludlow, astride the back of a 
donkey. He complained of neuralgia, and for six out 
of the ten months which he spent in England, he was 
shut up in a bedroom, reading and smoking, and ad- 
mitting no visitor. In April, 1847, he went down to 
Fareham, to stay with Mr. Kelsall, and this greatly 
brightened him up. From Fareham he proceeded in 
May to London, and there he met with his old friends 
the Procters. From Mrs. Procter the present vn-iter 
received a graphic account of his manners and appear- 
ance. She told me that his eccentricities were so 
marked that they almost ga\^ the impression of in- 
sanity, but that closer observation showed them to be 



46 Critical Kit-Kats 

merely the result of a peculiar fancy, entirely unaccus- 
tomed to restraint, and of the occasional rebound of 
spirits after a period of depression. The Procters 
found Beddoes a most illusive companion. He would 
come to them uninvited, but never if he had been 
asked, or if he feared to meet a stranger. On one 
occasion, Mrs. Procter told me, they had asked Beddoes 
to dine with them, and proceed afterwards to Drury 
Lane Theatre. He did not come, and they dined alone. 
On approaching the theatre, they saw Beddoes in 
charge of the police, and on inquiry found that he had 
just been arrested for trying to put Drury Lane on fire. 
The incendiary, however, had used no more dangerous 
torch than a five-pound note, and Mr. Procter had 
little difficulty in persuading the police that this was 
much more likely to hurt the pocket of Mr. Beddoes 
than the rafters of the theatre. 

In June, 1 847, Beddoes returned to Frankfurt, where 
he lived until the spring of 1848 with a baker named 
Degen, who was then about nineteen 3^ears of age — ■ 
" a nice-looking young man dressed in a blue blouse, 
fine in expression, and of a natural dignity of manner," 
Miss Zoe King describes him. While Beddoes was in 
Frankfurt his blood became poisoned from the virus of 
a dead body entering a slight wound in his hand. This 
was overcome, but it greatly weakened and depressed 
him. For six months he would see no one but Degen. 
He complained of disgust of life, and declared that his 
republican friends in Germany had deserted him. He 
persuaded Degen to become an actor, and he occupied 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 47 

himself in teaching him Enghsh and other accomphsh- 
ments, cutting himself off from all other company. At 
this time " he had let his beard grow, and looked like 
Shakespeare." In May, 1848, he left Frankfurt, in- 
ducing Degen to accompany him, and the two com- 
panions wandered together through Germany and 
Switzerland. In Zurich Beddoes chartered the theatre 
for one night, to give his friend an opportunity of 
appearing in the part of Hotspur. 

For about six weeks, so far as it is possible to discover, 
Beddoes was tolerably happy. But he was separated 
from Degen at Basel, where Beddoes took a room, in a 
condition of dejected apathy that was pitiful to witness, 
at the Cicogne Hotel. Here very early next morning 
he inflicted a deep wound on his right leg, with a razor. 
*' II etait miserable — il a voulu se tuer," as the waiter 
who attended upon him said afterwards to Miss Zoe 
King. He was, however, removed with success to the 
Town Hospital, where his friends Dr. Frey and Dr. 
Ecklin waited upon him. He had a pleasant private 
room, looking into a large garden. He communicated 
with his English friends, being very anxious to allay 
all suspicion. He wrote to his sister : " In July I fell 
with a horse in a precipitous part of the neighbouring 
hills, and broke m}^ left leg all to pieces." He begged 
no one in England to be anxious, and his version of 
the catastrophe was accepted without question. The 
leg, however, was obstinate in recovery, for the patient 
stealthily tore off the bandages, and eventually gan- 
grene of the foot set in. On the 9th of September it 



48 Critical KIt-Kats 

became necessary to amputate the leg below the knee- 
joint ; this operation was very successfully performed 
by Dr. Ecklin. Beddoes seems to have been cheerful 
during the autumn m^onths, and Degen came back to 
Basel, lodging near him in the town. The poet gave 
up all suicidal attempts, and it was considered that his 
mind on this matter was completely cured. His bed 
was covered with books, and he conversed and wrote 
freely about literature and science. He talked of 
going to Italy when he was convalescent, and in De- 
cember he walked out of his room twice. The first 
time he went out into the town, however, on the 26th 
of January, 1849, he seems to have used his authority 
as a physician to procure the deadly poison called 
Kurara ; in the course of the evening Dr. Ecklin was 
suddenly called to his bedside, and found the poet 
tying on hi?s back insensible, with the following extra- 
ordinary note, written in pencil, folded on his bosom. 
It was addressed to one of the oldest of his English 
friends, Mr. R. Phillips : 

*' My dear Phillips, — I am food for what I am good 
for — worms. I have made a will here, which I desire 
to be respected ; and add the donation of ;^20 to Dr. 
Ecklin my physician. W. Beddoes must have a case 
(50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 growth to drink 
my death in. Thanks for all kindnesses. Borrow the 
;^200. You are a good and noble man, and your 
children must look sharp to be like you. — Yours, if my 
own, ever "T. L. B. 



Thomas Lovell Beddocs 49 

*' Love to Anna, Henry, — ihe beddocs of i.ongvill 
and Zoc and Emmcline King. Also to Kclsall, whom 
I beg to look at my MSS. and print or not as fie thinks 
fit. I ought to have been, [among a] variety of other 
things, a good pi^ct. Life was too great a bore on one 
peg, and that a bad one. Buy for Dr. Eckhn above 
mentioned Reade's best stomach-pump." 

He died at 10 p.m. the same night, and was buried 
under a cypress in the cemetery of the hospital. The 
circumstances of his death, now for the first time pub- 
lished, were ascertained by Miss Zoe King, who visited 
Basel in 1857, and saw Degen, Frey, Ecklin, and the 
people at the Cicogne Hotel. After some delay, the 
various MSS. of Beddoes were placed in Kelsall's hands, 
and that faithful and admirable friend published that 
version of Death's Jestbook, which seemed to him the 
most attractive, in 1850 ; and this he followed, in 185 1, 
by the Miscellaneous Poems^ with an unsigned Memoir. 
These two volumes form the only monument hitherto 
raised to the memory of the unfortunate poet. The 
reception which was given to them was respectful, and 
even sympathetic. It may be sufficient here to give 
one instance of it, which has never been made public. 
Miss Zoe King, in an unprinted letter to Kelsall, 
says : ** I was at the Lakes with my uncle Edge- 
worth just after receiving the Death's Jesthook, and 
was ver}' much pleased to lend it to Mr. Tenny- 
son. He was just arrived (^and at a distance from us) 
on his weddmg tour, so that 1 merely saw him. He 

D 



50 Critical Kit-Kats 

returned the book witn a few lines ol praise, rating it 
highly." 



It is not in the fragments that Beddoes has left 
behind him that we can look for the work of a full- 
orbed and serene poetical genius. It would be a narrow 
definition indeed of the word " poet " which should 
exclude him, but he belongs to the secondary order of 
makers. He is not one of those whose song flows un- 
bidden from their lips, those born warblers whom 
neither poverty, nor want of training, nor ignorance, 
can restrain from tuneful utterance. He belongs to 
the tribe of scholar-poets, to the educated artists in 
verse. In every line that he wrote we can trace the 
influence of existing verse upon his mind. He is 
intellectual rather than spontaneous. Nor, even within 
this lower range, does his work extend far on either 
hand. He cultivates a narrow field, and his impressions 
of life and feeling are curiously limited and monotonous. 
At the feast of the Muses he appears bearing little 
except one small savoury dish, some cold preparation, 
we may say, of olives and anchovies, the strangeness 
of which has to make up for its lack of importance. 
Not every palate enjoys this hors (Tceuvre^ and when 
that is the case, Beddoes retires ; he has nothing else 
to give. He appeals to a few literary epicures, who, 
however, would deplore the absence of this oddly 
flavoured dish as mucn as thai of any more important 
piece de resistance. 



Tliomas Lovell Beddoes 51 

As a poet, the great defect of Beddoes has ahxady 
been indicated — his want of sustained invention, his 
powerlessness in evolution. He was poor just where, 
two hundred years earher, almost every playwright in 
the street had been strong, namely, in the ability to 
conduct an interesting story to a thrilling and appro- 
priate close. From this point of view his boyish play, 
The Brides^ Tragedy, is his only success. In this 
case a story was developed with tolerable skill to a 
dramatic ending. But, with one exception, he never 
again could contrive to drag a play beyond a certain 
point ; in the second or third act its wings would droop, 
and it would expire, do what its master would. These un- 
finished tragedies were like those children of Polynesian 
dynasties, anxiously trained, one after another, in the 
warm Pacific air, yet ever doomed to fall, on the borders 
of manhood, by the breath of the same mysterious 
disease. Dcatli's Jestbook is but an apparent exception. 
This does indeed appear in the guise of a finished five- 
act play ; but its completion was due to the violent 
determination of its author, and not to legitimate 
inspiration. For many years, in and out of season, 
Beddoes, who had pledged his whole soul to the finish- 
ing of this book, assailed it with all the instruments of 
his art, and at last produced a huge dramatic Franken- 
stein monster, which, by adroit editing, could be forced 
into the likeness of a tragedy. But no play in literature 
was less of a spontaneous creation, or was further from 
achieving the ideal of growing like a tree. 

From what Beddoes was not, however, it is time to 



52 Critical Kit-Kats 

pass to what he was. In several respects, then, he was a 
poetical artist of consummate ability. Of all the myriad 
poets and poeticules who have tried to recover the lost 
magic of the tragic blank verse of the EHzabethans, 
Beddoes has come nearest to success. If it were less 
indifferent to human interests of every ordinary kind, 
the beauty of his dramatic verse would not fail to fasci- 
nate. To see how strong it is, how picturesque, how 
admirably fashioned, we have only to compare it with 
what others have done in the same style, with the tragic 
verse, for instance, of Barry Cornwall, of Talfourd, of 
Home. But Beddoes is what he himself has called "a 
creeper into worm-holes." He attempts nothing per- 
sonal ; he follows the very tricks of Marston and Cyril 
Tourneur like a devoted disciple. The passions with 
which he deals are remote and unfamiliar ; we may go 
further, and say that they are positively obsolete. 

In another place I have compared Beddoes in poetry 
with the Helsche Breughel in painting. He dedi- 
cates himself to the service of Death, not with a brood- 
ing sense of the terror and shame of mortality, but from 
a love of the picturesque pageantry of it, the majesty and 
sombre beauty, the swift, theatrical transitions, the 
combined elegance and horror that wait upon the sudden 
decease of monarchs. His medical taste and training 
encouraged this tendency to dwell on the physical 
aspects of death, and gave him a sort of ghastly 
familiarity with images drawn from the bier and the 
charnel-house. His attitude, however, though cold and 
cynical, was always distinguished, and in his wildest 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 53 

fliglits of humour he commonly escapes vulgarity. In 
this hesliovvs himself a true poet. As we read his singular 
pages, we instinctively expect to encounter that touch of 
prose which, in Landor's phrase, will precipitate the 
whole, yet it never comes. Beddoes often lacks inspi- 
ration, but distinction he can never be said to lack. 

As a lyrist he appears, on the whole, to rank higher 
than as a dramatist. Several of his songs, artificial as 
they are, must always live, and take a high place in the 
literature of artifice. As a writer of this class of poem 
his experience of the Elizabethans was further kindled 
and largely modified by the example of Shelley. Never- 
theless his finest songs could never be taken for the 
work of Shelley, or, indeed, attributed to any hand but 
his own. Among them, the song in Torrismond is 
perhaps the sweetest and the most ingenious ; 

How many times do I love thee^ dear ! 
Jell me how many thoughts there be 
In the atmosphere 
Of a new falPn year 
Whose white and sable hours appear 

The latest fiake of Eternity : 
So many times do I love thee, dear. 

How many times do I love, again ! 
Tell me how many beads there are 
In a silver chain 
Of evening rain, 
Unravelled from the tumhling main. 

And threading the eye of a silver star : 
So many times do I love, again. 



54 Critical Kit-Kats 

Dream Pedlary the most exquisite : 

DREAM-PEDLARY. 

If there were dreams to sell. 

What would ^ou buy ? 
Some cost a passing hell. 

Some a light sigh, 
That shakes from Life's fresh crown 
Only a rose leaf down. 
If there were dreams to sell. 
Merry and sad to tell, 
And the crier rung the bell, 

What would you buy ? 

A cottage lone and still 

With bowers nigh, 
Shadowy, my woes to still 

Until I die : 
Such pearl from Lifers fresh crown 
Fain would I shake me down : 
Were dreams to have at will, 
2 his would best heal my ill. 

This would I buy. 

The Song of the Stygian Naiades and Old Adam, the 
Carrion Crow, are instances of fancy combined with 
grisly humour, of a class in which Beddoes has no Eng- 
lish competitor. The Harpagus ballad in the fourth act 
of Death^s Jestbook, and ** Lord Alcohol," which I printed 
for the first time in 1890, are less known, but no less 
vivid and extraordinary. The former of these closes 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 55 

in fierce stanzas, which Robert Browning almost ex- 
travagantly admired, and was never weary of reciting: 

From the old supper-giver* s poll^ 

He tore the manykingdomed mitre ; 
To him, who cost him his sorCs soul^ 

He gave it ; to the Persian fighter : 
And quoth. 
Old art thou, but a fool in blood: 

If thou hast made me eat my son, 
Cyrus has ta^en his grandsire^s food ; 

There's kid for child, and who hath won ? 

All kingdomless is thy old head. 

In which began the tyrannous fun ; 
ThouWt slave to him, who should be dead ; 

There's kid for child, and who hath won ? 

Beddoes possesses great sense of verbal melody, a 
fastidious ear, and considerable, though far from fault- 
less, skill in metrical architecture. His boyish volume, 
called The Improvisatorc, shows, despite its crudity, that 
these gifts were early developed. To say more in 
recommendation of Beddoes were needless. Those 
readers who are able to take pleasure in poetry so grim, 
austere, and abnormal, may safely be left to discover 
his specific charms for themselves. 

189a 



56 Critical Kit-Kats 

Bibliographical Note. 

During his own lifetime, with the exception of a few 
brief contributions to periodicals, Beddoes published 
nothing but two small volumes. One of these was 
The Improvisatore^ issued at Oxford in 1 821, and so 
successfully suppressed by its author, that not more 
than five or six copies are known to exist. It was 
reprinted for the first time in my 1890 edition, from a 
copy in the collection of Mr. J. Dykes Campbell. The 
other was The Brides^ Tragedy^ published by the 
Rivingtons in 1822. This is rare, though by no 
means so inaccessible as its predecessor. A second 
edition appeared in 185 1. This play I reprinted from 
a copy of the 1822 original in my own library. 

At the time of Beddoes' death in 1849 the bulk of 
his MSS. remained inedited. He specially bequeathed 
his papers and the disposal of them to Thomas Forbes 
Kelsall, a solicitor at Fareham, who was the oldest and 
the most intimate of his English friends. The family 
of the poet, whose knowledge of him had grown very 
slight, were at first exceedingly undesirous that his 
poetic MSS. should be preserved, although they were 
willing to pay for the publication of any scientific 
writings. Their repugnance was finally overcome, and 
in 1850 Kelsall pubhshed, in a thin volume, Death^s 
Jestbook. The editing of this poem was no light task, 
for no fewer than three distinct texts, differing very 
considerably between themselves, were found to exist. 
Kelsall collated these three versions, and produced a 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 57 

selected text of his own, to which I in the main ad- 
hered. If the interest in Bcddocs should continue to 
grow, it will always be possible to produce a variorum 
edition of Death's Jestbook, a demand for which, how- 
ever, is hardly to be expected. 

In 185 1 Kelsall collected the miscellaneous poems 
and dramatic fragments into a volume entitled Poons 
by the late TlioDias Lovell Beddoes^ to which he prefixed 
an anonymous memoir of the poet, which is a model of 
loving care and respect for the memory of the departed ; 
a man of whom it might then be said with unusual truth, 
that he was a bard " whom there were none to praise 
and very few to love." The result of Kelsall's zeal was 
that, for the first time, the poetry of Beddoes began to 
excite attention. Of Death's Jestbook very few copies 
had been sold, and it is extremely rare in that original 
condition. The sheets of this and of the Poems were 
rebound, with a new title-page ("The Poems, posthu- 
mous and collected, of Thomas Lovell Beddoes"), 1851, 
in two volumes, to the second of which The Brides^ 
Tragedy was added. In this form Beddoes is usually 
known to collectors, but even these volumes are now 
difficult to procure. The remainder of them was dis- 
persed by auction in 1855, since which time until 1890 
Beddoes was out of print. 

In 1853 Miss Zoe King, Beddoes' cousin, wrote to 
Kelsall : " I do not know whether I mentioned to you 
the high terms of praise with which both Mr. and Mrs. 
Browning spoke of the poems, just as they were pub- 
lished." Miss Zoe King preserved a romantic interest 



58 Critical Kit-Kats 

in T. L. Beddoes, although she, like every other mem- 
ber of his family, knew very little indeed about him 
personally. She wrote to Kelsall : " I could give you 
very little information of my early reminiscences of my 
poor Cousin, as I was so much in awe of his reserve 
and of his talents that I seldom conversed with him." 
It was, nevertheless, Miss King for whom Kelsall pre- 
served the highest consideration, and her wishes were 
consulted in the next step which he took. He had 
religiously preserved every scrap of Beddoes' writing, 
and was anxious that these MSS. should be kept 
together. In consequence of Miss King's report of the 
admiration which the Brownings felt for Beddoes, and 
the fact that Robert Browning was the only English 
poet younger than himself in whom Beddoes took any 
interest, Kelsall made up his mind to make him the 
repository of the MSS. But he did not know him. 
Towards the close, however, of Bryan Waller Procter's 
life — I think in 1 866 or 1867 — Browning and Kelsall 
met at his house on one single occasion, and the latter 
then stated his request. 

It is now proper to give the text of the papers by 
which Kelsall made the transfer of the Beddoes MSS. 
to Robert Browning ; 

"Fareham, &/>f. 30, 1869. 

*' It is my wish that after my death, when and so 
soon as my wife may think proper, the whole of the 
Beddoes MSS. and papers should be transferred to Mr. 
Robert Browning, who has consented to accept the 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 59 

charge. It is most desirable, however, that she should 
look through them and remove the extraneous matter, 
as there are letters of other people, accounts, &c., 
which only swell the bulk without increasing the in- 
terest. Mr. Browning is to have Miss King's Journal 
from Switzerland and such of her letters as throw light 
on Beddoes' life or death. As to the latter, I have 
considered that my lips were sealed (relating to the 
suicide) during Miss King's lifetime, since such was her 
wish, altho' the fact has been communicated to me from 
an independent source. When my wife and I went to 
Basle in 1868, we visited Dr. Ecklin (Beddoes' much- 
esteemed physician), and found that he had no doubt 
as to the injuries which brought Beddoes to the hospital 
having been self-inflicted, and that accident there was 
none. 

** He saw a good deal of Beddoes during his stay at 
the hospital before and after the amputation, and con- 
sidered that in all their communications the origin of 
his situation was an understood fact between them. 
Dr. Ecklin added the startling information that the final 
catastrophe was, in his opinion, the direct result of a 
self-administered poison — all the symptoms being 
otherwise wholly unaccountable, and corresponding to 
those appropriate to the application of a very strong 
poison called Kurara or [blank in MS.]. He was evi- 
dently tired of life, and the fact of his being so, and 
of having achieved his release, need not, after a fair 
allowance for family hesitation, and in my opinion 
should not, be withheld from the knowledge of those 



6o Critical Kit-Kats 

who take a deep and true interest in Beddoes as a great 
poet. 

"Thos. F. Kelsall." 

To this paper succeeded another : 

" I transfer to Robert Browning all my interests and 
authority in and over the MSS. and the papers of or 
concerning the poet Beddoes, for him to act discre- 
tionally for the honour of the poet. 

" The greater portion of these MSS. was given by 
him to me in his life-time, and the remainder placed at 
my absolute disposal by his death-bed memorandum. 

** T. F. Kelsall. 

** Fareham, June 15, '72." 

Shortly after this Mr. Kelsall died, and the box 
containing the Beddoes papers was transmitted to Mr 
Robert Browning. They remained locked up and 
unexamined until, in July, 1 883, Mr. Browning invited 
me to help him in undertaking a complete investigation 
of the MSS. When we had reduced them to some 
order, he lent them to me, and I made such transcripts 
and collations as formed the basis of the edition of 
1890. With regard to the circumstances of Beddoes' 
death, which were then for the first time made public, it 
was Mr. Browning's wish that Kelsall's instructions 
should be followed, at a proper interval after the death 
of Miss Zoe King, who was the last person to whom 
the statement could give any personal pain. Miss 
King died on Sept. 28, 1881, and I therefore judged 



Thomas Lovell Beddoes 6i 

that the time had arrived for carrying out Kelsall's 
directions. In 1893 I completed the task which my 
revered friend, Mr. Browning, had laid upon me, by 
prirting the Correspondence of Beddoes, in a single 
volume. 

In the preparation of all these volumes I received 
invaluable aid from another deeply regretted friend, 
JMr. J. Dykes Campbell, who was unequalled and 
perhaps unapproached in his knowledge of the late 
Georgian period of English poetical history. The Bed- 
does Papers remain in the possession of Mr. Robert 
Barrett Browning, who very kindly lent them to me 
again, that I might revise my collation. 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 



Edward FitzGerald 

In 1885 a great stimulus to curiosity about the trans- 
lator of Omar Khayyam was given by the double 
inscription, prologue and epilogue, ave atque valc^ in 
which Lord Tennyson put forth his Tiresias to the 
world under the shadow of the name of Edward Fitz- 
Gerald. The curtain was for a moment drawn from 
the personality of one of the most recluse and seques- 
tered of modern men of letters, and we saw, with the 
eyes of the Poet Laureate, one of the earliest and one 
of the most interesting of his associates : 

Old Fitz^ zvho from your suburb grange. 

Where once I tarried for a whiky 
Glance at the wheeling orb of change. 

And greet it with a kindly smile ; 
Whom yet I see as there you sit 

Beneath your sheltering garden-tree. 
And watch your doves about you fit ^ 

And plant on shoulder, hand and knee. 
Or on your head their rosy feet. 

As if they knew your diet spares 
Whatever moved in that full sheet 

Let down to Peter at his prayers ; 
Who feed on milk ana meal and grass!* 

E 



66 Critical Kit-Kats 

This dedication, as we now learn, had been written 
a week before FitzGerald's death, in June, 1883, when 
the intimacy of the two poets had lasted for nearly fifty 
years. Other friends, scarcely less dear or less ad- 
mired, had already preceded Fitz Gerald to the grave. 
Thackeray, a little before the end, in reply to his 
daughter's inquiry which of his old friends he had 
loved most, had answered, *' Why, dear old Fitz, to be 
sure." Carlyle growled at the comparative rarity of 
"your friendly human letters," and a few more — James 
Spedding, Thompson of Trinity, Crabbe, Bernard 
Barton — had tempted his woodland spirit from its haunts. 
But few indeed among the living can boast of having 
enjoyed even a slight personal acquaintanceship with 
Edward FitzGerald, and almost his only intimate friend 
now left is the editor of the Letters and Literary 
Remains (Macmillan & Co. : 3 vols.), which have re- 
vealed even to those who had placed Fitz Gerald's 
genius highest and studied him most carefully an un- 
suspected individuality of great force and charm. The 
learned and accomplished Vice-Master of Trinity has 
fulfilled his task in a manner almost too modest. He 
leaves FitzGerald to speak to us without a commentary 
from the pages of his matchless translations and from 
the leaves of his scarcely less delightful letters. 

Edward Purcell was born in a Jacobean mansion at 
Bredfield, three miles from Woodbridge, in Suffolk, on 
the 31st of March, 1809. His father had married a Miss 
FitzGerald, and on the death of her father, in 18 18, he 
assumed the name and arms of FitzGerald. The poet's 



Edward FitzGerald 67 

childhood was spent in France, but at the age of thirteen 
he went to a school at Bury St. Edmunds, where the 
Spcddings, W. B. Donne, and J. M. Kemble were 
among his schoolfellows. In 1 82(5 he was entered at 
Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1828 he formed the 
friendship of two freshmen, slightly younger than 
himself, who were to be his intimates for life, W. M. 
Thackeray and W. H. Thompson, lately Master of 
Trinit3\ He saw Lord Tennyson about this time, 
although he did not make his acquaintance until they 
left college ; but half a century later he retained a clear 
recollection of the appearance of the Poet Laureate as 
an undergraduate — " I remember him well, a sort of 
Hyperion." 

It is consistent with all that w^e learn of the shy 
fidelit}' of FitzGerald that almost all the friendships of 
his life were formed before he was one-and-twenty. 
As early as 1830 he warns Thackeray not to invite him 
to meet anybody ; *' I cannot stand seeing new faces in 
the polite circles ; " and while the rest of the com- 
panionship, each in his own way, turned to conquer 
the world, FitzGerald remained obstinately and success- 
fully obscure. In 1831 he was nearly caught, for a 
very delicate and fantastic lyric, published anonymously 
in the Af/icjicriint, attracted remark and was attributed 
to Charles Lamb. FitzGerald took a farmhouse of his 
father's on the battle-field of Naseby, and paid no heed 
to the outstretched hands of the Sirens. He was in 
easy circumstances and adopted no profession. The 
seat of his family, and his own main residence until 



Critical Kit-Kats 



1835, was Wherstead Lodge, a house beautifully placed 
on the west bank of the Orwell, about tv/o miles from 
Ipswich. Thence they removed to a less attractive 
mansion, Boulge, near Woodbridge, in the same county, 
close to the place of his birth, and there FitzGerald 
resided until 1853. He then went to Farhngay Hall, 
an old farmhouse, where Carlyle visited him ; in i860 
he moved to lodgings in Woodbridge, and in 1873 ^o 
Little Grange, where he remained until his death. 
Nor, at first, did he give promise of being more than 
an admirer, a contemplator, even in the fairy world of 
literature. We get charming glimpses of his sympa- 
thetic nature in some of the early letters. On the 7th 
of December, 1832, he sa3^s : 

** The news of this week is that Thackeray has come 
but is going to leave again for Devonshire directly. 
He came very opportunely to divert my Blue Devils : 
notwithstanding, we do not see very much of each 
other : and he has now so many friends (especially the 
Bulters) that he hiis no such wish for my society. He 
is as full of good humour and kindness as ever. The 
next news is that a new volume of Tennyson is out, 
containing nothing more than you have in MS. except 
one or two things not worth having 

'* I have been poring over Wordsworth latety, which 
has had much effect in bettering my Blue Devils : for 
his philosophy does not abjure melancholy, but puts a 
pleasant countenance upon it, and connects it with 
humanity. It is very well, if the sensibility that makes 
us fearful of ourselves is diverted to become a cause of 



Edward FitzGerald 69 

sympathy and interest with nature and mankind : and 
tliis I think Wordsworth tends to do. I think I told 
you of Shakespeare's sonnets before : I cannot tell you 
what sweetness I find in them. 

* So hy Shakespeare's sonnets roasted, and Wordsworth's poems 
basted. 
My heart will be well toasted, and excellently tasted.* 

**This beautiful couplet must delight you, I think." 
In June, 1834, Thackeray was illustrating "my 
Undine " (possibly a translation of Fouqu^'s romance) 
" in about fourteen little coloured drawings, very nicely." 
What has become of this treasure? In May, 1835, 
some of the friends were together in the Lakes, and we 
get, incidentally, a pleasant glimpse of the most illus- 
trious of them : 

"Alfred Tennyson stayed with me at Ambleside. 
Spedding was forced to go home, till the last two days 
of my stay here. I will say no more of Tennyson than 
that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have 
to think him great. His little humours and grumpi- 
nesses were so droll, that I was always laughing ; and 
was often put in mind (strange to say) of my little un- 
known friend, Undine — I must, however, say, further, 
that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of de- 
pression at times from the overshadowing of a so much 
more lofty intellect than my own : this (though it may 
seem vain to say so) I never experienced before, though 
I have often been with much greater intellects : but i 
could not be mistaken in the universalit}^ of his mind ; 



JO Critical Kit-Kats 

and perhaps I have received some benefit in the now 
more distinct consciousness of my dwarfishness." 

His time, when the roses were not being pruned, and 
when he was not making discreet journeys in uneventful 
directions, was divided between music, which greatly 
occupied his younger thought, and literature, which 
slowly, but more and more exclusively, engaged his 
attention. His loneliness, and the high standard by 
which in his remote seclusion he measured all contem- 
porary publications, gives an interest to his expressions 
with regard to new books, an interest which centres 
around himself more, perhaps, than around the work 
criticised. For instance, he says, in April, 1838, to the 
Quaker poet, Bernard Barton, who was his neighbour 
at Woodbridge, and whose daughter he eventually 
married. 

" I am very heavy indeed with a kind of influenza, 
which has blocked up most of my senses, and put a wet 
blanket over my brains. This state of head has not 
been improved by trying to get through a new book 
much in fashion — Carlyle's French Revolution — written 
in a German style. An Englishman writes of French 
Revolutions in a German style I People say the book 
is very deep ; but it appears to me that the meaning 
seems deep from lying under mystical language. There 
is no repose, nor equable movement in it : all cut up 
into short sentences half reflective, half narrative ; so 
that one labours through it as vessels do through what 
is called a short sea — small, contrary-going waves caused 
by shallows, and straits, and meeting tides, &c. I like 



Edward FitzGerald 71 

to sail before the wind over the surface of an even-roll- 
ing eloquence, like that of Bacon or the Opium-Eater. 
There is also pleasant fresh-water sailing with such 
writers as Addison. Is there any />o«^-sailing in litera- 
ture ? that is, drowsy, slow, and of small compass ? 
Perhaps we may say, some Sermons. But this is only 
conjecture. Certainly Jeremy Taylor rolls along as 
majestically as any of them. We have had Alfred 
Tennyson here, very droll and very wayward, and much 
sitting up of nights till two and three in the morning, 
with pipes in our mouths : at which good hour we would 
get Alfred to give us some of his magic music, which 
he does between growling and smoking, and so to bed." 
Few poets have been able to prepare for their life's 
work by so long and so dreary a novitiate. In 1839 
FitzGerald gives Bernard Barton a more than commonly 
full account of his daily life. He goes with a fellow- 
fisherman, "my piscator," two miles off to fish, and has 
tea in a pothouse, and so walks home. " For all which 
idle ease," he says, ** I think I must be damned." Or 
else upon glorious sunshiny days he lies at full length in 
his garden reading Tacitus, with the nightingale singing 
and some red anemones flaunting themselves in the sun. 
"A funny mixture all this; Nero, and the delicacy of 
spring ; all very human, however. Then, at half-past 
one, lunch on Cambridge cream cheese ; then a ride over 
hill and dale : then spudding up some weeds from the 
grass ; and then, coming in, I sit down to write to you." 
No wonder thatCarlyle, groaning in London under the 
weight of his work and his indigestion, would gird play- 



72 Critical Kit-Kats 

fully at the " peaceable man " at Woodbridge, with his 
" innocent /«r niente life." FitzGerald on his part, was 
by no means blind to the seamy side of the loud Carly- 
lean existence, but wished it were calmer, and retired to 
his Horace Walpole and his Tale of a Tub with fresh 
gusto after being tossed, as he called it, on Carlyle's 
" canvas waves." After an unusual burst of Chelsea 
eloquence, FitzGerald proposes a retreat ; " We will all 
sit under the calm shadow of Spedding's forehead." 
Carlyle, meanwhile, after growing better acquainted with 
FitzGerald, to whom Thackeray had first presented him, 
became even more attached to him, and visiting him, 
they scraped for human bones together in the Naseby 
battle-field. Here is a scrap from a letter of Carlyle to 
FitzGerald, dated October i6, 1844 : 

" One day we had Alfred Tennyson here ; an unfor- 
gettable day. He stayed with us till late ; forgot his 
stick : we dismissed him with Macpherson^s Farewell. 
Macpherson (see Burns) was a Highland robber ; he 
played that Tune, of his own composition, on his way 
to the gallows ; asked, ^ If in all that crowd the Mac- 
pherson had any clansman ? ' holding up the fiddle that 
he might bequeath it to some one. * Any kinsman, any 
soul that wished him well ? ' Nothing answered, nothing 
durst answer. He crushed the fiddle under his foot, 
and sprang off. The Tune is rough as hemp, but strong 
as a lion. I never hear it without something of emotion 
— poqr Macpherson ; though the artist hates to play it. 
Alfred's dark face grew darker, and I saw his lip slightly 
quivering I " 



Edward FitzGcrald 73 

The life that slipped away at Woodbriclge in a reverie 
so graceful and so roseate was not undisturbed from 
time to time by voices from the outer world calling it to 
action ; but through a long series of years the appeal 
was resolutely put by. When almost all his friends 
were writers it could not be but that FitzGerald was con- 
scious of a tendency to write, and there are signs in his 
correspondence of an occasional yielding to the ten- 
dency. But in all these early years he was never har- 
assed by what he describes as '' the strong inward call, 
the cruel-sweet pangs of parturition," which he observed 
with the curiosity of a physician, in the spirits of Tenny- 
son and Thackeray. He knew very well that he had 
the power, if he chose, to pour out volume after volume, 
like others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease ; 
but his belief was that, ** unless a man can do better, he 
had best not do at all." It is in 1 847 that we find him, 
as a lucky discovery of Mr. Aldis Wright's informs us, 
plunging for the first time, though with the cryptic 
anonymity which he would continue to observe, into 
print. When Singer published his edition of Selden's 
Table Talk in that year, the illustrative matter was con- 
tributed by a gentleman whom the editor was not per- 
mitted to name. Mr. Aldis Wright has found the originals 
of these notes in FitzGerald's handwriting. Two 3'ears 
later he set his initials at the foot of a desultory memoir 
of Bernard Barton, prefixed to the subscription edition 
of the collected poems of that mild and ineffectual bard, 
who had died in the preceding February. It is remark- 
able, however, that FitzGerald's first serious enterprise 



74 Critical Kit-Kats 

in authorship was undertaken so late as in his forty- 
third 3^ear — at an age, that is to say, when most men 
who are to be famous in letters have already given 
copious evidence of their powers. 

Fitz Gerald's first book, Euphranor^ was published by 
Pickering in 1 851, a modest little volume not passing 
much beyond the limits of a pamphlet. It seems to 
have been the child of memories of Cambridge impreg- 
nated by the Socratic talk of Spedding, who had 
lately been visiting FitzGerald. It is a Platonic dialogue, 
easily cast — somewhat in the manner, one may say, of 
Berkeley's Alciphron — in a framework of landscape, 
Cambridge courts and halls, the river, the locks, the 
deep breeze blowing through the mays and the labur- 
nums. The characters discuss the Godefridus of Sir 
Kenelm Digby, and how the principles of chivalry can 
be wholesomely maintained in modern life. Slight, 
perhaps, and notably unambitious, Euphranor could 
scarcely have been written by any one but FitzGerald 
< — unless, possibly, in certain moods, by Landor — and 
it remains the most complete and sustained of his prose 
works. He had scarcely published it, and, as shyly as 
Sabrina herself, had peeped from '* the rushy-fringed 
bank " of Deben to see how the world received it, 
before he found himself engaged on another little 
anonymous volume. The tiny green* 1852 quarto of 
Polonius lies before me at this moment, a presentation 



* The grass-green cover of the original edition reminds us that "la 
Verdad es siempre verde." 



Edward FitzGerald y^ 

copy to the author's sister, "Andalusia De Soyres, 
from her Aftccte. E. F. G." It is a collection of wise 
saws and modern instances, some of them his own, 
most of them borrowed from Bacon, Seldcn, Kenelm 
Digby, and, of the living, Carlyle and Newman, the 
whole graced by a charming and most characteristic 
preface by FitzGerald himself. And now he began 
with zeal to undertake the proper labour of his life- 
time — he became a translator of poetry. 

Six or seven years before this time, FitzGerald was 
corresponding on familiar terms with a younger friend, 
who survives him, and who appears to have been, to a 
very singular degree, and in the full Shakespearean 
sense, the "only begetter" of these ensuing transla- 
tions. This was Mr. E. B. Cowell, now Professor of 
Sanskrit at Cambridge. As early as 1846 Mr. Cowell 
had introduced FitzGerald to Hafiz ; in 1852 we find 
that the latter has " begun again to read Calderon with 
Cowell ; " and from a letter written long afterwards to 
the late Sir Frederick Pollock, we learn that their first 
study of Calderon dated from at least 1850. Fitz- 
Gerald cared for but little in Spanish literature. He 
tried some of the other dramatists — Tirso de Molina, 
Lop6 de Vega, Moratin, but he could take but scant 
interest in these. His admiration of Calderon, on the 
other hand, was inexhaustible, and he began to work 
assiduously at the task of translating him, taking all 
Shelley's pleasure in the "starry autos." The volume 
called Six Dramas of Calderon^ freely translated by 
Edward FitzGerald^ was issued by Pickering in 1853, 



76 Critical Kit-Kats 

and is the only one of all FitzGerald's publications 
which bears his name upon it. The six plays are : 
The Painter of his own Dishonour, Keep your own 
Secret, Gil Perez the Gallician, Three Judgments at a 
Blow, The Mayor of Zalanca, and Beware of Smooth 
Water. The book is now of extreme scarcity, the 
translator having withdrawn it from circulation in one 
of his singular fits of caprice, partly, I believe, on 
account of the severity with which its freedom as a 
paraphrase was attacked. I am bound to say, however, 
that I find no traces of irritation on this subject in his 
letters of 1853, which refer to various reviews in a 
very moderate and sensible spirit. 

The Calderon had scarcely passed through the printer^s 
hands when Fitz Gerald took up the study of Persian, 
still in company with and under the direction of Mr. 
Cowell. In 1854, when he was visiting that friend at 
Oxford, he began to try his hand on a verse transla- 
tion of the Saldmdn and Absdl of Jami, " whose 
ingenious prattle I am stilting into too Miltonic verse." 
This was published in 1856, anonymously, with a 
picturesque " Life of Jami," and a curious frontispiece 
of warriors playing polo. Meanwhile Mr. Cowell was 
appointed Professor of History at a Calcutta college, 
and one main stimulus to steady production was re- 
moved out of FitzGerald's life. Yet, by good fortune 
for us, Mr. Cowell's absence from England induced 
FitzGerald to write to him more fully about his work 
than he would have done if the friends could have met. 
And here, on the 20th of March, 1857, we are allowed 



Edward FitzGerald 77 

to be present at the first conception of what was after- 
wards to become the famous and admired Omar 
Khayydm : 

** To-day I have been writing twenty pages of a 
metrical Sketch of the Mantic, for such uses as I told 
you of. It is an amusement to me to take what liberties 
I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not 
poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, 
and who really do want a little art to shape them. I 
don't speak of Jel^leddin whom I know so little of 
(enough to show me that he is no great artist, how- 
ever), nor of Hafiz, whose best is untranslatable because 
he is the best musician of words. Old Johnson said 
the poets were the best preservers of a language : for 
people must go to the original to relish them. I am 
sure that what Tennyson said to you is true : that 
Hafiz is the most Eastern — or, he should have said, 
most Persian — of the Persians. He is the best repre- 
sentative of their character, whether his Saki and wine 
be real or mystical. Their religion and philosophy is 
soon seen through, and always seems to me cuckooed 
over like a borrowed thing, which people, once having 
got, don't know how to parade enough. To be sure, 
their roses and nightingales are repeated enough ; but 
Hafiz and old Omar Khayyam ring like true metal. 
The philosophy of the latter is, alas ! one that never 
fails in the world." 

He was soon keenly engaged on his task ; had in 
April opened up a correspondence with Garcin de 
Tassy about texts of Omar in the Paris libraries. 



yS Critical Kit-Kats 

This was the busiest year of FitzGerald's hterary Ufa. 
In May he was already beginning to warn his friend of 
another possible '* sudden volume of translations," the 
desire to conquer a province of iEschylus in his peculiar 
way having seized him. The only result, however, was 
the preparation — but at what date I do not seem able 
to discover — of that extraordinary translation of the 
Agamemnon, eventually printed without name of author, 
title-page, or imprint, in a hideous cover of grocer's 
azure, which is one of the rarest of FitzGerald's issues. 
In January, 1 85 8, he began the dismal business of 
trying, and at first vainly trying, to find a publisher 
bold enough to embark on the perilous enterprise of 
printing the little pamphlet of immortal music called 
The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam. On the subject of 
this publication much has been loosely said and con- 
jecturally reported of late years. We may, therefore, 
be glad to read FitzGerald's own account, in a letter to 
the late Master of Trinity : 

''As to my own peccadilloes in verse, which never 
pretend to be original, this is the story of Rubdiydt. 
I had translated them partly for Cowell : young Parker 
asked me some years ago for something for Fraser, and 
I gave him the less wicked of these to use if he chose. 
He kept them for two years without using : and as I 
saw he didn't want them I printed some copies with 
Quaritch ; and, keeping some for myself, gave him the 
rest. Cowell, to whom I sent a copy, was naturally 
alarmed at it ; he being a very religious man : nor have 
I given any other copy but to George Borrow, to whom 



Edward FitzGerald 79 

I had once lent the Persian, and to old Donne when he 
was down here the other da}', to whom I was showing a 
passage in another book which brought myold Omar up." 
On the 15th of January, 1859, as Mr. W. Aldis 
Wright has been kind enough to ascertain for me, 
the Rubdiydt was issued, in the casual way above in- 
dicated, and fell absolutely flat upon the market. There 
is no evidence in FitzGerald's correspondence that it 
attracted the smallest attention, and, except for a letter 
from Mr. Ruskin, which circled the globe for ten years 
(this sounds incredibly characteristic, but seems to be true) 
before it reached its address, the first publication of his 
magnificent poem appears to have brought FitzGerald no 
breath of recognition from the world outside the circle 
of his friends. The copies in Mr.Quaritch's shop seem to 
have found no buyers, and to have gravitated rather 
surprisingly soon to the fourpcnny boxes outside the 
booksellers' stalls. Here Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so 
legend relates, discovered the hid treasure in i860, and 
proclaimed it among his friends, Mr. Swinburne being 
forward in the generous race to make the poem appre- 
ciated at its proper value. It marks a rise in the 
barometer of popularity that Monckton Milnes (Lord 
Houghton) is anxiously inquiring for a copy or two in 
May, 1 86 1. Yet it was not until 1868 that a second 
edition, now scarcely less rare and no whit less in- 
teresting to the collector, was called for. Since that 
time, much revised by its far too careful author, the 
Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm has been reprinted in all 
manner of shapes, both on this side of the Atlantic and 



Critical Kit-Kats 



on the other. To pursue the record of his literary life, 
Fitzgerald translated two more plays of Calderon, the 
Magico prodigiosoy at which Shelley had tried his hand, 
and the Vida es Sueno^ which Trench had attempted. 
These he never published, but in 1865 he printed them, 
without title-page, and sent the strange Httle volume, in a 
grey paper wrapper, to a few of his friends. With 
the exception of the two CEdipus dramas, circulated in 
the same quaint, shy way, in 1880, these were the last 
of Fitzgerald's poetical translations. 

He had grown more and miore interested in the 
water-way leading from the pastoral meadows of Wood- 
bridge to the sea, the salt road between the trees called 
Bawdsey Haven, which brings you, if you go far 
enough down it, to the German Ocean at last. His 
favourite companions became fishermen and the cap- 
tains of boats, and in 1867 an old wish was realised at 
length, when FitzGerald became part owner of a 
herring-lugger — The Meum and Tuum as he called 
her, and possessed a captain of his own. Later on, 
he bought a yacht, The Scandal. " Nothing but ship," 
he says, from June to November, through all those 
months, " not having lain, I believe, for three consecu- 
tive nights in Christian sheets," but mostly knocking 
about somewhere outside of Lowestoft. The theory 
was that the lugger should pay her way, but Fitz- 
Gerald and his captain, ** a grand, tender soul, lodged 
in a suitable carcase," did not make the profit that they 
hoped for, and after four years of considerable anxiety, 
FitzGerald parted from his boat and from her master. 



Edward FitzGerald 8i 

The latter was a humble friend in whom, physically 
and spiritually, there must have been something splen- 
didly attractive, and regarding whom FitzGerald uses 
phraseology otherwise reserved for Tennyson and 
Thackeray. The poet still kept a boat upon the 
Dcben, but went out no more upon the deep after 
herrings and mackerel, in company with his auburn- 
haired and blue-eyed giant from Lowestoft, "altogether," 
he says, " the greatest man I have known." 

And so, almost imperceptibly, as the reader moves 
down the series of these delightful letters, he finds 
that the writer, in his delicate epicureanism, is, without 
repining at it, growing old. A selection from his early 
favourite poet, a Suffolk man like himself, George 
Crabbe, is his last literary enterprise, and so on the 
14th of June, 1883, in his seventy-fifth year, he rather 
suddenl}^ passes away painlessly in his sleep. His 
own words shall be his epitaph : "An idle fellow, but 
one whose friendships were more like loves." 

The strange issues of Calderon, of ^Eschylus, of 
J^mi, of Sophocles, with which it was FitzGerald's 
pleasure to confound bibliographers, are now great 
rarities ; not one of all his printed works, except the 
Omar KhayyaiUy has hitherto been easy to obtain. We 
may generally say in looking over all these versions, 
that FitzGerald more than any other recent translator 
of poetry, carried out that admirable rule of Sir John 
Denham's, that the translator's business is not " alone 
to translate language into language, but poesie into 
poesie; and poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in 

F 



Critical Kit-Kats 



pouring out of one language into another, it will all 
evaporate, if a new spirit be not added in the trans- 
lation." FitzGerald's versions are so free, he is so 
little bound by the details of his orignal, he is so 
indifferent to the timid pedantry of the ordinary writer 
who empties verse out of the cup of one language into 
that of another, that we may attempt with him what 
would be a futile task with almost every other English 
translator — we may estimate from his versions alone 
what manner of poet he was. 

In attempting to form such an estimate we are bound 
to recognise that his best-known work is also his best. 
The Omar Khayyam of FitzGerald takes its place in 
the third period of Victorian poetry, as an original 
force wholly in sympathy w^th other forces of which 
its author took no personal cognisance. Whether or 
no it accurately represents the sentiments of a Persian 
astronomer of the eleventh century is a question which 
fades into insignificance beside the fact that it stimu- 
lated and delighted a generation of young readers, to 
whom it appealed in the same manner, and along 
parallel lines with, the poetry of Morris, Swinburne, 
and the Rossettis. After the lapse of thirty years we 
are able to perceive that in the series of poetical publi- 
cations of capital importance which marked the close of 
the fifties it takes its natural place. In 1858 appeared 
The Defence of Guinevere; in 1859, the Rubdiydt of 
Omar Khayyam; in i860. The Queen -Mother and 
Rosamond; in 1862, Goblin Market; while, although 
the Poems of D. G. Kossetti did not finally see the 



Edward FitzGerald 



light till 1870, bis presence, his spiritual influence, had 
animated the group. That FitzGerald was ignorant of, 
or wholly indillerent to, the existence of these his com- 
peers did not affect his relationship to them, nor their 
natural and instinctive recognition of his imaginative 
kinship to themselves. The same reasscrtion of the 
sensuous elements of literature, the same obedience to 
the call for a richer music and a more exotic and im- 
passioned aspect of manners, the same determination 
to face the melancholy problems of life and find a 
solace for them in art, were to be found in the anony- 
mous pamphlet of Oriental reverie as in the romances, 
dramas, songs, and sonnets of the four younger friends. 
So much more interesting to us, if we will look 
sensibly at the matter, is FitzGerald than the Omar 
Khayyam whose mantle he chose to masquerade in 
that we are not vexed but delighted to learn from Mr. 
Aldis Wright that the opening stanza, which ran thus 
in the edition of 1859 : 

Awake ! for morning in the bowl of night 
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight ; 

And lo ! the hunter of the East has caught 
The Sultanas turret in a noose of lights 

is wholly his own, and represents nothing in the 
original. It was judged by his earliest critics to be 
too close a following of the fantastic allusiveness of the 
Persian, and the poet — surely with his tongue set in 
his cheek — modified his own invention to the smoother 
but less spirited ; 



84 Critical Kit-Kats 

Wahe ! for the sun behind yon Eastern height 
Has chased the session of the stars from night ; 
And^ to the field of heaven ascending, strikes 
The Sultanas turret with a shaft of light. 

It is well to remind ourselves of these two versions, 
of which each is good, though the first be best, because 
Fitz Gerald was sufficiently ill-advised to exchange for 
both a much tamer version, which now holds its place 
in the text. These alterations, however, are very 
significant to the critic, and exhibit the extreme care 
with which FitzGerald revised and re-revised his work. 

To judge, however, of his manner as a translator, or 
rather as a paraphraser, we must examine not merely 
the most famous and remarkable of his writings, but 
his treatment of Spanish and Greek drama, and of the 
narrative of J ami. It appears that he took Dryden's 
licence, and carried it further ; that he steeped himself 
in the language and feeling of his author, and then 
threw over his version the robe of his own peculiar 
style. Every great translator does this to some extent, 
and we do not recognise in Chapman's breathless 
gallop the staid and polished Homer that marches 
down the couplets of Pope. But then, both Pope and 
Chapman had, in the course of abundant original com- 
position, made themselves each the possessor of a style 
which he threw without difficulty around the shoulders 
of his paraphrase. In the unique case of FitzGerald — 
since Fairfax can scarcely be considered in the same 
category — a poet of no marked individuality in his 



Edward FitzGerald 85 

purely independent verse created for himself, in the 
act of approaching masterpieces of widely dificrent 
race and age, a poetical style so completely his own 
that we recognise it at sight as his. The normal 
instances of this manner are familiar to us in Omar 
Khayyam. They are characterised by a melody which 
has neither the variety of Tennyson nor the vehemence 
of Mr. Swinburne, neither the motion of a river nor of 
the sea, but which rather reminds us, in its fulness and 
serenity, of the placid motion of the surface of a lake, 
or of his own grassy estuary of the Deben ; and finally 
by a voluptuous and novel use of the commonplaces of 
poetry — the rose, the vine, the nightingale, the moon. 
There are examples of this typical manner of FitzGerald 
to be found in Omar Khayyam^ which are unsurpassed 
for their pure qualities as poetry, and which must 
remain always characteristic of what was best in a 
certain class of Victorian verse. Such are : 

Jlas, that spring should vanish with the rose ! 
That youth'' s sweet-scented manuscript should close / 

7he nightingale that in the branches sang, 
jihy whence and whither f own again, who knows I 

and (a gem spoiled in recutting, after the first edition, 
by the capricious jeweller) : 

Thus with a loaf of bread beneath the bough, 
A flask of wine, a book of verse — and thou 

Beside me singing in the wilderness — 
And wilderness is Paradise enow. 



86 Critical Kit-Kats 

Nothing quite so good, perhaps, as these and many 
more which might be quoted from the Omar Khayyam^ 
is to be found in the other translations, yet wherever 
the latter are happiest they betray the same hand and 
murmur the same accents. It is in The Mighty 
Magician that we meet with such characteristic stanzas 
as this : 

Who that in his hour of glory 

Walks the kingdom of the rose, 
And misapprehends the story 

Which through all the garden blows s 
Which the southern air who brivgs 
It touches, and the leafy strings 

Lightly to the touch respond ; 
And nightingale to Jiightingale 

Answering on hough beyond—^ 
Nightingale to nightingale 

Answering on bough beyond. 

While the following passage, perhaps the richest and 
most memorable in FitzGerald's minor writings, is 
found in the Saldmdn and Absdl: 

When they had saiPd their vessel for a moon, 
And marr'd their beauty with the wind o" the sea, 
Suddenly in mid-sea reveal' d itself 
An isle, beyond imagination fair ; 
An isle that was all garden ; not a flower. 
Nor bird of plumage like the flower, but there s 
Some like the flower, and others like the leaf; 
Some, as the pheasant and the dove, adorned 



Edward FitzGerald 87 

Jilth crown and collar^ over zuhm, alone. 
The jezuelPd peacock like a sultan shone : 
While the musicians^ and among them chief 
The nightingale^ sang hidden in the trees^ 
Which ^ arm in arm^ from fingers quivering 
With any breath of air, fruit of all kind 
Down scattered in profusion to their feet. 
Where fountains of szueet water ran between^ 
And sun and shadow chequer-chased the green^ 
This Iram-gardcn seem'd in secrecy 
Blowing the rosebud of its revelation ; 
Or Paradise, forgetful of the dawn 
Of Audit ^ lifted from her face the veil. 

In reading these sumptuous verses the reader may 
be incHned to wonder why Saldmdn and Absdl is not 
as widely known and as universally admired as the 
Omar Khayydm. If it were constantly sustained at 
anything like this level it would be so admired and 
known, but it is, unfortunately, both crabbed and 
unequal. 

It was in 1854, as FitzGerald reminds Professor 
Cowell in a very interesting letter, that these friends 
began to read J^mf together. We have seen that it 
was not until 1856 and after the completion of the 
Saldmdn and Absdl that the same friend placed Omar 
in FitzGerald's hands. The paraphrase of Jami, there- 
fore, is the earlier of the two, and represents the style 
of the English poet at a stage when it was still 
unfinished and, I think, imperfectly refined. The 
narrative of J^mi is diff'use, and, as FitzGerald soon 



Critical Kit-Kats 



found, " not line by line precious ; " he was puzzled 
how to retain his character and yet not permit it to be 
tedious, and he has not wholly succeeded in clearing 
his poem from the second horn of the dilemma. 
The original text of 1856 differs in almost every line, 
and sometimes essentially, from that now published in 
FitzGerald's work. I do not know on what the later 
text is founded, but probably on a revision found 
among his papers. I confess that the bolder early 
version seems to me considerably the more poetical. 
Sdldman and Absdl consists of a mystical preliminary 
invocation, in which the problem of responsibility and 
free-will, in the form which interested the English 
poet so much, is boldly stated and the double question 
put: 

If I — this spirit that inspires me whence ? 
If thou — then what this sensual impotence ? 

and of the story, told in three parts, with a moral or 
transcendental summing-up at the close. The metrical 
form chosen for the main narrative is blank verse, with 
occasional lapses into rhyme. These, in all proba- 
bility, respond to some peculiarity in the Persian 
original, but they are foreign to the genius of English 
prosody, and they produce an effect of poverty upon 
the ear, which is alternately tempted and disappointed. 
There are, moreover, incessant interludes or episodical 
interpolations, which are treated in an ambling measure 
of four beats, something like the metre of Hiawatha^ 
but again with occasional and annoying introductions 



Edward FitzGerald 89 

of rhyme. It is obvious, at the outset, that we do not 
see FitzGerald here exercising that perfect instinct for 
form which he afterwards developed ; he was tram- 
melled, no doubt, by his desire to repeat the eflccts he 
discovered in the Persian, and had not yet asserted his 
own genius in what Dryden called metaphrase. Never- 
theless, Saldmdn and Absdl contains passages of great 
beauty, such as that in which the poet, in wayward 
dejection, confesses that his worn harp is no longer 
modulated, and that 

Methinks 
*Tzcere time to break and cast it in the fire : 
The vain old harp, thaty breathing from its strings 
No music more to charm the ears of many 
Mayy from its scented ashes , as it burns, 
Breatl)e resignation to the harper'' s soul. 

And the description of Absal, the lovely infant nurse of 
the new-born Sal^man (1856 text) : 

Her years not twenty ^ from the silver line, 
Dividing the musk-harvest of her hair, 
Down to her foot y that trampled crowns of kings ^ 
A moon of beauty full. 

Very curious and charming, too, are the descriptions 
of Sal^man's victory over the princes at polo, and his 
headlong ride to the shore of the abyss that was 
haunted by the starry dragon, and whose island crags 
cuts its surface " as silver scissors slice a blue brocade." 

A third Persian poem, the Bird-Parliament of Farid- 



90 Critical KIt-Kats 



Uddin Attar, written immediately after the publication of 
Omar Khayyam in 1859, was first printed by Mr. Aldis 
Wright thirty years later, and forms a very important 
addition to FitzGerald's works. It is a long, mystical 
piece of Oriental transcendentaHsm, the best part of 
which is the opening pages, in which the various birds 
are introduced, spreading their jewelled plumage one 
by one before the tajidar, the royal lapwing, who is 
their shah or sultan. When the poem becomes purely 
philosophical, it seems to me to become less attractive, 
perhaps sometimes a little tedious ; yet the versification 
is always charming, the heroic couplet treated as 
smoothly and correctly as by Congreve or Addison, but 
with far greater richness. 

Of Fitz Gerald as a prose writer there has hitherto 
been little known. His correspondence now reveals 
him, unless I am much mistaken, as one of the most 
pungent, individual, and picturesque of English letter- 
writers. Rarely do we discover a temperament so 
mobile under a surface so serene and sedentary ; rarely 
so feminine a sensibility side by side with so virile an 
intelligence. He is moved by every breath of Nature ; 
every change of hue in earth or air affects him ; and 
all these are reflected, as in a camera obscura, in the 
richly-coloured moving mirror of his letters. It will 
not surprise one reader of this correspondence if the 
name of its author should grow to be set, in common 
parlance, beside those of Gray and Cowper for the 
fidelity and humanity of his addresses to his private 
friends. Meanwhile, we ought, perhaps, to have remem- 



Edward FitzGerald 91 

bered what beautiful pages there were in Euphranor^ 
and in particular to have recalled that passage about 
the University boat-races which Lord Tennyson, no 
easy critic to satisfy, has pronounced to be one of the 
most beautiful fragments of English prose extant. 
Not many in this generation have met with Euphrauor^ 
and I may quote this passage with the certainty that it 
is new to all or nearly all of my readers : 

"Townsmen and gownsmen, with the tassell'd 
Fellow-commoner sprinkled here and there — reading 
men and sporting men — Fellows, and even Masters of 
Colleges, not indifferent to the prowess of their respec- 
tive crews — all these, conversing on all sorts of topics, 
from the slang in Bell's Life to the last new German 
revelation, and moving in ever-changing groups down 
the shore of the river, at whose farther bend was a 
little knot of ladies gathered up on a green knoll faced 
and illuminated by the beams of the setting sun. Be- 
yond which point was at length heard some indistinct 
shouting, which gradually increased, until ' They are 
off — they are coming I ' suspended other conversation 
among ourselves ; and suddenly the head of the first 
boat turned the corner ; and then another close upon 
it ; and then a third ; the crews pulling with all their 
might compacted into perfect rhythm ; and the crowd 
on shore turning round to follow along with them, 
waving hats and caps, and cheering, ' Bravo, St. 
John's 1 ' * Go it, Trinity I ' — the high crest and blowing 
forelock of Phidippus's mare, and he himself shouting 
encouragement to his crew, conspicuous over all — until, 



92 Critical Kit-Kats 

the boats reaching us, we also were caught up in the 
returning tide of spectators, and hurried back toward 
the goal '; where we arrived just in time to see the 
ensign of Trinity lowered from its pride of place, and 
the eagle of St John's soaring there instead. Then, 
waiting a little while to hear how the winner had won, 
and the loser lost, and watching Phidippus engaged in 
eager conversation with his defeated brethren, I took 
Euphranor and Lexilogus under either arm (Lycion 
having got into better company elsewhere) and walked 
home with them across the meadow leading to the 
town, whither the dusky troops of gownsmen with all 
their confused voices seemed as it were evaporating in 
the twilight, while a nightingale began to be heard 
among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus." 

Who is rashly to decide what place may not finally 
be awarded to a man capable of such admirable feats 
in English prose and verse ? There can be little doubt 
that when much contemporary clamour has died out 
for ever, the clear note of the Nightingale of Wood- 
bridge will still be heard from the alleys of his Persian 
garden. 

1889. 



WALT WHITMAN 



Walt Whitman 



r ATIMA was permitted, nay encouraged, to make use 
of all the rooms, so elegantly and commodiously fur- 
nished, in Bluebeard Castle, with one exception. It 
was in vain that the housemaid and the cook pointed 
out to her that each of the ladies who had preceded her 
as a tenant had smuggled herself into that one forbidden 
chamber and had never come out again. Their sad ex- 
perience was thrown away upon Fatima, who pene- 
trated the fatal apartment and became an object of 
melancholy derision. The little room called " Walt 
Whitman," in the castle of literature, reminds one of 
that in which the relics of Bluebeard's levity were 
stored. We all know that discomfort and perplexity 
await us there, that nobody ever came back from it with 
an intelligible message, that it is piled with the bones of 
critics ; yet such is the perversity of the analytic mind, 
that each one of us, sooner or later, finds himself peep- 
ing through the keyhole and fumbling at the lock. 

As the latest of these imprudent explorers, I stand a 
moment with the handle in my hand and essay a defence 
of those whose skeletons will presently be discovered. 
Was it their fault ? Was their failure not rather due 



96 Critical Kit-Kats 

to a sort of magic that hangs over the place ? To drop 
metaphor, I am sadly conscious that, after reading what 
a great many people of authority and of assumption 
have written about Whitman — reading it, too, in a 
humble spirit — though I have been stimulated and en- 
tertained, I have not been at all instructed. Pleasant 
light, of course, has been thrown on the critics them- 
selves and on their various peculiarities. But upon 
Whitman, upon the place he holds in literature and life, 
upon the questions, what he was and why he was, surely 
very little. To me, at least, after all the oceans of talk, 
after all the extravagant eulogy, all the mad vitupera- 
tion, he remains perfectly cryptic and opaque. I find no 
reason given by these authorities why he should have 
made his appearance, or what his appearance signifies. 
I am told that he is abysmal, putrid, glorious, universal 
and contemptible. I like these excellent adjectives, 
but I cannot see how to apply them to Whitman. Yet, 
like a boy at a shooting-gallery, I cannot go home till I, 
too, have had my six shots at this running-deer. 

On the main divisions of literature it seems that a 
critic should have not merely a firm opinion, but sound 
argument to back that opinion. It is a pilgarlicky mind 
that is satisfied with saying, ** I like you, Dr. Fell, the 
reason why I cannot tell." Analysis is the art of telling 
the reason why. But still more feeble and slovenly is 
the criticism that has to say, " I liked Dr. Fell yester- 
day and I don't like him to-day, but I can give no 
reason." The shrine of Walt Whitman, however, is 
strewn around with remarks of this kind. Poor Mr. 



Walt Whitman 97 

Swinburne has been cruelly lauglied at for calling him 
a "strong-winged soul, with prophetic lips hot with the 
blood-beats of song," and yet a drunken apple-woman 
reeling in a gutter. But he is not alone in this incon- 
sistency. Almost every competent writer who has 
attempted to give an estimate of Whitman has tumbled 
about in the same extraordinary way. Something 
mcphitic breathes from this strange personality, some- 
thing that maddens the judgment until the wisest lose 
their self-control. 

Therefore, I propound a theory. It is this, that there 
is no real Walt Whitman, that is to say, that he cannot 
be taken as any other figure in literature is taken, as 
an entity of positive value and defined characteristics, 
as, for instance, we take the life and writings of Racine, 
or of Keats, or of Jeremy Taylor, including the style 
with the substance, the teaching with the idiosyncrasy. 
In these ordinary cases the worth and specific weight 
of the man are not greatly affected by our attitude 
towards him. An atheist or a quaker may contemplate 
the writings of the Bishop of Dromore without sympathy; 
that does not prevent the Holy Dying from presenting, 
even to the mind of such an opponent, certain defined 
features which are unmodified by like or dislike. This 
is true of any fresh or vivid talent which may have 
appeared among us yesterday. But I contend that it 
is not true of Whitman. Whitman is mere bathybiiis ; 
he is literature in the condition of protoplasm — an in- 
tellectual organism so simple that it takes the instant 
impression of whatever mood approaches it. Hence 

G 



98 Critical Kit-Kats 

the critic who touches Whitman is immediately con- 
fronted with his own image stamped upon that viscid 
and tenacious surface. He finds, not what Whitman 
has to give, but what he himself has brought. And 
when, in quite another mood, he comes again to Whit- 
man, he finds that other self of his own stamped upon 
the provoking protoplasm. 

If this theory is allowed a moment's consideration, 
it cannot, I think, but tend to be accepted. It accounts 
for all the difficulties in the criticism of Whitman. It 
shows us why Robert Louis Stevenson has found a 
Stevenson in Leaves of Grass, and John Addington 
S3^monds a Symonds. It explains why Emerson con- 
sidered the book " the most extraordinary piece of wit 
and wisdom that America has yet [in 1855] produced;" 
why Thoreau thought all the sermons ever preached 
not equal to it for divinity ; why Italian dilettanti and 
Scandinavian gymnasts, anarchists and parsons and 
champions of women's rights, the most opposite and 
incongruous types, have the habit of taking Whitman 
to their hearts for a little while and then flinging him 
away from them in abhorrence, and, perhaps, of draw- 
ing him to them again with passion. This last, however, 
I think occurs more rarely. Almost every sensitive and 
natural person has gone through a period of fierce 
Whitmanomania ; but it is a disease which rarely 
afflicts the same patient more than once. It is, in fact, 
a sort of highly-irritated egotism come to a head, and 
people are almost always better after it. 

Unless we adopt some sucn theory as this, it is 



Walt Whitman 99 

dilTicult to account in any way for the persistent influ- 
ence of Walt Whitman's writings. They have now 
lasted about forty years, and show no sign whatever of 
losing their vitality. Nobody is able to analyse their 
charm, yet the charm is undeniable. They present no 
salient features, such as have been observed in all other 
literature, from Homer and David down to the latest 
generation. They offer a sort of Plymouth Brethren- 
ism of form, a negation of all the laws and ritual of 
literature. As a book, to be a living book, must con- 
tain a vigorous and appropriate arrangement of words, 
this one solitary feature occurs in Leaves of Grass. I 
think it is not to be denied by any candid critic, how- 
ever inimical, that passages of extreme verbal felicity 
are to be found frequently scattered over the pages of 
Whitman's rhapsodies. But, this one concession made 
to form, there is no other. Not merely are rhythm 
and metre conspicuously absent, but composition, 
evolution, vertebration of style, even syntax and the 
limits of the English tongue, are disregarded. Every 
reader who comes to Whitman starts upon an expedi- 
tion to the virgin forest. He must take his conveni- 
ences with him. He will make of the excursion what 
his own spirit dictates. There are solitudes, fresh air, 
rough landscape, and a well of water, but if he wishes 
to enjoy the latter he must bring his own cup with 
him. When people are still young and like roughing 
it, they appreciate a picnic into Whitman-land, but it 
is not meant for those who choose to see their intellec- 
tual comforts round them. 

Lora 



loo Critical Kit-Kats 



In the early and middle years of his life, Whitman 
was obscure and rarely visited. When he grew old, 
pilgrims not unfrequently took scrip and staff, and set 
out to worship him. Several accounts of his appear- 
ance and mode of address on these occasions have been 
published, and if I add one more it must be my excuse 
that the visit to be described was not undertaken in 
the customary spirit. All other accounts, so far as I 
know, of interviews with Whitman have been written 
by disciples who approached the shrine adoring and 
ready to be dazzled. The visitor whose experience — 
and it was a very delightful one — is now to be 
chronicled, started under what was, perhaps, the dis- 
advantage of being very unwilling to go ; at least, it 
will be admitted that the tribute — for tribute it has to 
be — is all the more sincere. 

When I was in Boston, in the winter of 1 884, I 
received a note from Whitman asking me not to leave 
America without coming to see him. My first instinct 
was promptly to decline the invitation. Camden, New 
Jersey, was a very long way off. But better counsels 
prevailed ; curiosity and civility combined to draw me, 
and I wrote to him that I would come. It would be 
fatuous to mention all this, if it were not that I particu- 
larly wish to bring out the peculiar magic of the old 
man, acting, not on a disciple, but on a stiff-necked and 
froward unbeliever. 

To reach Camden, one must arrive at Philadelphia, 



Walt Whitman loi 

where I put up on the 2nd of January, 1885, ready to 
pass over into New Jersey next morning. I took the 
hall-porter of the hotel into my confidence, and asked 
if he had ever heard of Mr. Whitman. Oh, yes, they 
all knew " Walt," he said ; on fine days he used to 
cross over on the ferry and take the tram into Philadel- 
phia. He liked to stroll about in Chestnut Street and 
look at the people, and if you smiled at him he would 
smile back again ; everybody knew ** Walt." In the 
North, I had been told that he was almost bedridden, 
in consequence of an attack of paralysis. This seemed 
inconsistent with wandering round Philadelphia. 

The distance being considerable, I started early on the 
3rd, crossed the broad Delaware River, where blocks 
of ice bumped and crackled around us, and saw the 
flat shores of New Jersey expanding in front, raked by 
the broad morning light. I was put ashore in a crude 
and apparently uninhabited village, grim with that 
concentrated ugliness that only an American township 
in the depth of winter can display. Nobody to ask the 
way, or next to nobody. I wandered aimlessly about, 
and was just ready to give all I possessed to be back 
again in New York, when I discovered that I was 
opposite No. 328 Mickle Street, and that on a minute 
brass plate was engraved "W. Whitman." I knocked 
at this dreary little two-storey tenement house, and 
wondered what was going to happen. A melancholy 
woman opened the door ; it was too late now to go 
away. But before I could speak, a large figure, hob- 
bling down the stairs, called out in a cheery voice, " Is 



I02 Critical Kit-Kats 

that my friend ? " Suddenly, by I know not what 
magnetic charm, all wire-drawn literary reservations 
faded out of being, and one's only sensation was of 
gratified satisfaction at being the " friend " of this very 
nice old gentleman. 

There was a good deal of greeting on the stairs, and 
then the host, moving actively, though clumsily, and 
with a stick, advanced to his own dwelling-room on 
the first storey. The opening impression was, as the 
closing one would be, of extreme simplicity. A large 
room, without carpet on the scrubbed planks, a small 
bedstead, a little round stove with a stack-pipe in 
the middle of the room, one chair — that was all the 
furniture. On the walls and in the fireplace such a 
miserable wall-paper — tinted, with a spot — as one 
sees in the bedrooms of labourers* cottages; no pictures 
hung in the room, but pegs and shelves loaded with 
objects. Various boxes lay about, and one huge 
clamped trunk, and heaps, mountains of papers in a 
wild confusion, swept up here and there into stacks 
and peaks ; but all the room, and the old man himself, 
clean in the highest degree, raised to the ;^th power of 
stainlessness, scoured and scrubbed to such a pitch that 
dirt seemed defied for all remaining time. Whitman, 
in particular, in his suit of hodden grey and shirt 
thrown wide open at the throat, his grey hair and 
whiter beard voluminously flowing, seemed positively 
blanched with cleanliness ; the whole man sand-white 
with spotlessness, like a deal table that has grown old 
under the scrubbing-brush. 



Walt Whitman 103 

Whitman sat down in the one chair with a small 
poker in his hand and spent much of his leisure in 
feed'ng and irritating the stove. I cleared some papers 
away from off a box and sat opposite to him. When 
he was not' actively engaged upon the stove his steady 
attention was fixed upon his visitor, and I had a perfect 
opportunity of forming a mental picture of him. He 
sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown back- 
ward, as if resting it one vertebra lower down the 
spinal column than other people do, and thus tilting his 
face a little upwards. With his head so poised and 
the whole man fixed in contemplation of the inter- 
locutor, he seemed to pass into a state of absolute 
passivity, waiting for remarks or incidents, the glassy 
eyes half closed, the large knotted hands spread out 
before him. So he would remain, immovable for a 
quarter of an hour at a time, even the action of speech 
betraying no movement, the lips hidden under a 
cascade of beard. If it be true that all remarkable 
human beings resemble animals, then Walt Whitman 
was like a cat — a great old grey Angora Tom, alert in 
repose, serenely blinking under his combed waves of 
hair, with eyes inscrutably dreaming. 

His talk was elemental, like his writings. It had 
none of the usual ornaments or irritants of conversation. 
It welled out naturally, or stopped ; it was innocent of 
every species of rhetoric or epigram. It was the 
perfectly simple utterance of unaffected urbanity. So, 
I imagine, an Oriental sage would talk, in a low 
uniform tone, without any excitement or haste, without 



104 Critical Kit-Kats 

emphasis, in a land where time and flurry were 
unknown. Whitman sat there with his great head 
tilted back, smiling serenely, and he talked about 
himself. He mentioned his poverty, which was patent, 
and his paralysis ; those were the two burdens 
beneath which he crouched, like Issachar ; he seemed 
to be quite at home with both of them, and scarcely 
heeded them. I think I asked leave to move my box, 
for the light began to pour in at the great uncurtained 
window ; and then Whitman said that some one had 
promised him a gift of curtains, but he was not eager 
for them, he thought they **kept out some of the light." 
Light and air, that was all he wanted ; and through 
the winter he sat there patiently waiting for the air 
and light of summer, when he would hobble out agam 
and bask his body in a shallow creek he knew " back 
of Camden." Meanwhile he waited, waited with infinite 
patience, uncomplaining, thinking about the sand, and 
the thin hot layer of water over it, in that shy New 
Jersey creek. And he winked away in silence, while 
I thought of the Indian poet Valmiki, when, in a trance 
of voluptuous abstraction, he sat under the fig-tree and 
was slowly eaten of ants. 

In the bareness of Whitman's great double room 
only two objects suggested art in any way, but each of 
these was appropriate. One was a print of a Red 
Indian, given him, he told me, by Catlin ; it had inspired 
the passage about '* the red aborigines " in Starting from 
PaumanoL The other — positively the sole and only 
thing that redeemed the bareness of the back-room 



Walt Whitman 105 

where Whitman's bound works were stored — was a 
photograph of a very handsome young man in a boat, 
sculHng. I asked him about this portrait and he said 
several notable things in consequence. He explained, 
first of all, that this was one of his greatest friends, a 
professional oarsman from Canada, a well-known sport- 
ing character. He continued, that these were the 
people he liked best, athletes who had a business in 
the open air ; that those were the plainest and most 
aflectionate of men, those who lived in the light and 
air and had to study to keep their bodies clean and 
fresh and ruddy ; that his soul went out to such people, 
and that they were strangely drawn to him, so that at 
the lowest ebb of his fortunes, when the world reviled 
him and ridiculed him most, fortunate men of this kind, 
highly prosperous as gymnasts or runners, had sought 
him out and had been friendly to him. " And now," 
he went on, '' I only wait for the spring, to hobble out 
with my staff into the woods, and when I can sit all 
day long close to a set of w^oodmen at their work, I 
am perfectly happ}^, for something of their life mixes 
with the smell of the chopped timber, and it passes 
into my veins and I am old and ill no longer." I 
think these were his precise words, and they struck me 
more than anything else that he said throughout that 
long and pleasant day I spent with him. 

It might be supposed, and I think that even admirers 
have said, that Whitman had no humour. But that 
seemed to me not quite correct. No boisterous humour, 
truly, but a gentle sort of sly fun, something like 



io6 Critical Kit-Kats 

Tennyson's, he certainly showed. For example, he 
told me of some tribute from India, and added, with a 
twinkling smile, " You see, I * sound my barbaric yawp 
over the roofs of the world.'" But this was rare: 
mostly he seemed dwelling in a vague pastoral past life, 
the lovely days when he was young, and went about 
with '' the boys " in the sun. He read me many things ; 
a new " poem," intoning the long irregular lines of it 
not very distinctly ; and a preface to some new edition. 
All this has left, I confess, a dim impression, swallowed 
up in the serene self-unconsciousness, the sweet, digni- 
fied urbanity, the feline immobility. 

As I passed from the little house and stood in dull, 
deserted Mickle Street once more, my heart was full 
of affection for this beautiful old man, who had just 
said in his calm accents, ** Good-bye, my friend 1 " 
I felt that the experience of the day was embalmed by 
something that a great poet had written long ago, but 
I could not find what it was till we started once more 
to cross the frosty Delaware ; then it came to me, and 
I knew that when Shelley spoke of 

Peace within and calm around. 

And that content^ surpassing wealth. 

The sage in meditation found. 

And walked with inward glory crowned, 

he had been prophesying of Walt Whitman, nor shall 
I ever read those lines again without thinking of the 
old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience 
and philosophy. 



Walt Whitman 107 

And so an unbeliever went to see Walt Whitman, 
and was captivated without being converted. 



It is related ot the great Condd that, at the opening 
of his last campaign, sunken in melancholy, half mad- 
dened with fatigue and the dog-star heat of summer, 
ha^nng reached at length the cool meadows in front of 
the Abbey of St. Antoine, he suddenly leaped from his 
horse, flung away his arms and his clothing, and rolled 
stark-naked in the grass under a group of trees. 
Having taken this bath amidst his astonished officers, 
he rose smiling and calm, permitted himself to be 
dressed and armed anew, and rode to battle with all 
his accustomed resolution. The instinct which this 
anecdote illustrates lies deep down in human nature, 
and the more we are muffled up in social conventions 
the more we occasionally long for a whimsical return 
to nudity. If a writer is strong enough, from one 
cause or another, to strip the clothing off from civilisa- 
tion, that writer is sure of a welcome from thousands 
of over-civilised readers. 

Now the central feature of the writings of Walt 
Whitman is their nakedness. In saying this I do not 
refer to half-a-dozen phrases, which might with ease 
be eliminated, that have thrown Mrs. Grundy into fits. 
No responsible criticism will make a man stand or fall 
by what are simply examples of the carrying of a theory 
to excess. But of the theory itself I speak, and it is 
one of uncompromising openness. It is a defence of 



io8 Critical Kit-Kats 

bare human nature, stripped, not merely of all its 
trappings and badges, but even of those garments 
which are universally held necessary to keep the cold 
away. In so many of his writings, and particularly, of 
course, in the Discours of 1750, Rousseau undertook 
the defence of social nudity. He called upon his world, 
which prided itself so much upon its elegance, to divest 
the body politic of all its robes. He declared that 
while Nature has made man happy and virtuous, society 
it is that renders him miserable and depraved, there- 
fore let him get rid of social conventions and roll naked 
in the grass under the elm-trees. The invitation, as I 
have said, is one which never lacks acceptance, and 
Rousseau was followed into the forest by a multitude. 

If Walt Whitman goes further than Rousseau, it 
merely is that he is more elementary. The tempera- 
ment of the American is in every direction less com- 
plex. He has none of the restless intellectual vivacity, 
none of the fire, none of the passionate hatred of 
iniquity which mark the French philosopher. With 
Walt Whitman a coarse simplicity suffices, a certain 
blunt and determined negation of artificiality of every 
kind. He is, roughly speaking, a keenly observant 
and sentient being, without thought, without selection, 
without intensity, egged on by his nervous system to 
a revelation of himself. He records his own sensations 
one after another, careful only to present them in 
veracious form, without drapery or rhetoric. His 
charm for others is precisely this, that he observes so 
closely, and records so great a multitude of observa- 



Walt Whitman 109 

tions, and presents them with so complete an absence 
of prejudice, that any person who approaches his 
writings with an unbiassed mind must discover in 
them a reflection of some part of himself. This I 
believe to be the secret of the extraordinary attraction 
which these rhapsodical utterances have for most 
emotional persons at one crisis or another in their 
life's development. But I think criticism ought to be 
able to distinguish between the semi-hysterical pleasure 
of self-recognition and the sober and legitimate delights 
of literature. 

The works of .Walt Whitman cover a great many 
pages, but the texture of them is anything but subtle. 
When once the mind perceives what it is that Whit- 
man says, it is found that he repeats himself over and 
over again, and that all his " gospel " (as the odious 
modern cant puts it) is capable of being strained into 
very narrow limits. One *' poem " contains at least 
the germ of all the sheaves and sheaves of writing 
that Whitman published. There is not one aspect 
of his nature which is not stated, or more than broadly 
hinted at, in the single piece which he named after 
himself, " Walt Whitman." It was appropriately 
named, for an unclothing of himself, an invitation to 
all the world to come and prove that, stripped of his 
clothes, he was exactly like everybody else, was the 
essence of his religion, his philosophy, and his poetry. 

It is not unfair to concentrate attention on the 
section of sixty pages which bears the name "Walt 
Whitman" in the volume of his collected writings. 



no Critical Kit-Kats 

It is very interesting reading. No truly candid person 
meeting with it for the first time, and not previously 
prejudiced against it, could but be struck with its 
felicities of diction and its air of uncontrolled sincerity. 
A young man of generous impulses could scarcely, I 
think, read it and not fall under the spell of its sym- 
pathetic illusions. It contains unusually many of those 
happy phrases which are, I contend, the sole purely 
literary possession of Whitman. It contains dozens 
of those closely-packed lines in each of which Whitman 
contrives to concentrate a whole picture of some action 
or condition of Nature. It contains, perhaps, the finest, 
certiainly the most captivating, of all Whitman's natural 
apostrophes : 

Press close, bare-bosom' d night. Press close, magnetic, nourish' 

ing night ! 
Night of south winds I night of the large few stars! 
Still, nodding night I mad, naked summer night I 
Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath' d earth ! 
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees ! 
Earth of departed sunset / earth of the mountains, misty-topt ! 
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue / 
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river ! 
Earth of the limpid grey of clouds, brighter and clearer for my 

sake ! 
Far-swooping, elbow* d earth 1 rich, apple-blossom' d earth ! 
Smile, for your lover comes ! 

All this represents the best side of the author ; but 
"Walt Whitman " exhibits his bad sides as well — his 
brutality, mis-styling itself openness, his toleration of 



Walt Whitman 1 1 1 

the ugly and the forbidden, his terrible laxity of thought 
and fatuity of judgment. 

If he studies **Walt Whitman " carefully, a reader 
of middle life will probably come to the conclusion 
that the best way to classify the wholly anomalous and 
irregular writer who produced it is to place him by 
himself as a maker of poems in solution. I am inclined 
to admit that in Walt Whitman we have just missed 
receiving from the New World one of the greatest of 
modern poets, but that we have missed it must at the 
same time be acknowledged. To be a poet it is not 
necessary to be a consistent and original thinker, with 
an elaborately-balanced system of ethics. The absence 
of intellectual quality, the superabundance of the 
emotional, the objective, the pictorial, are no reasons 
for undervaluing Whitman's imagination. But there 
is one condition which distinguishes art from mere 
amorphous expression ; that condition is the result of 
a process through which the vague and engaging obser- 
vations of Whitman never passed. He felt acutely 
and accurately, his imagination was purged of external 
impurities, he lay spread abroad in a condition of 
literary solution. But there he remained, an expanse 
of crystallisable substances, waiting for the structural 
change that never came ; rich above almost all his 
coevals in the properties of poetry, and yet, for want 
of a definite shape and fixity, doomed to sit for ever 
apart from the company of the Poets. 

1893. 



COUNT LYOF TOLSTOI 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 

It has been the misfortune of Count Tolstoi to become 
widely known in the West of Europe at the very moment 
when he was performing a complete change of dress. 
The legitimate enthusiasm which his works of the ima- 
gination might awaken has been confused with the 
perhaps equally legitimate, but certainly much more 
obvious and vulgar surprise at the amazing character of 
his new social and religious views. If the alteration had 
taken place sooner or later, it would have been pleasanter 
for us and juster to him. If he had always written in 
a language ^hi-b wc. cculd understand, we should long 
ago have comprehended the nature of his literary genius, 
and should have been less startled by his moral trans- 
formation ; if the presentation to Europe had been de- 
layed, we should have taken his work as a whole. But 
in point of fact, we were constantly being assured that 
behind the dyed curtains of that Scythian tent there sat 
a mysterious chieftain, arrayed in all the splendours of 
the Orient. We tear the veil aside at last, and discover 
a gentleman /« piiris natnralibiis^ selecting a new set of 
garments. It is true that this disturbing circumstance 
has enormously added to the fame and success of the 
Russian \\Titer, and that a hundred persons are found 



ii6 Critical Kit-Kats 

to discuss his nakedness to one who cares to think of 
what he was when he was clothed. But this is Httle 
consolation to the student of pure literature, who feels 
inclined to drive out the social group, and to guard Count 
Tolstoi's doors till he has wrapped himself once more 
in raiment, whether civilised or savage. 

Of the moral speculations of the great Russian 
novelist nothing shall here be said. Most of what has 
passed for recent criticism has occupied itself with a 
vain and capricious agitation of Tolstoi's views on mar- 
riage, on education, on non-resistance to authority, to 
the exclusion of all other considerations. It would be 
absurd to deny that some of these theories irresistibly 
invite discussion, or that the distinguished gravity of 
the author is not justly fascinating to an age which has 
been exhausted and lacerated by the funniness of its 
funny men. But it is difficult not to see, also, that 
speculation of this kind has been pursued in one form 
or another by every generation, that it has never yet 
succeeded in solving the riddle of this painful earth, 
and that in contrast to its evasiveness and intangibility, 
the positive consideration of literature as literature has 
a great charm. In these few words, then, Tolstoi will 
not be treated as the prophet or saviour of society, but 
as the writer of novels. For this extremely unpopular 
mode of regarding him, a critic's best excuse is to recall 
those touching and noble words written by Tourgenieff 
in his last hours to his great successor : 

" Dearest Lyof Nikolaievitch, it is long since I wrote 
to you. I have been in bed, and it is my death-bed. I 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 117 

cannot get well ; that is no longer to be thought of. I 
write to you expressly to assure you how happy I have 
been to be your contemporary, and to present to you a 
last, a most urgent request. Dear friend, come back to 
literary work I This gift came to you whence all gifts 
come to us. Ah ! how happy should I be if I could 
think that you would listen to my request. My friend, 
great writer of our land of Russia, grant me this 
request." 

The author of Anna Karcnine has granted it in some 
degree, but how rarely, how fitfully, with how little of 
the artist's fire and consecration I Let us hope that in 
a near future he will give us of the things of the spirit 
in less niggardly a fashion. Let him remember that at 
the present moment there is no man living from whom 
a sane and complete work of fiction, on a large scale, 
would be more universally welcomed. 



The life of the Russian novelist has often been nar- 
rated, but presents no features of very remarkable 
interest. Count Lyof Nikolaievitch Tolstoi was born 
on August 28 (o.s.), 1828, at Yasnaya Pol3^ana, an 
estate on the road to Orel, a few miles out of Tula, in 
the centre of Russia. This place and its suiTOundings 
were described in a very charming paper contributed by 
Mr. Kennen to The Century Magazine for June 1887. 
Yasnaya Polyana has been the alpha and omega of 
Tolstoi's life, all absences from it being of the nature of 



ii8 Critical Kit-Kats 

episodes. He has made it his sole residence for the 
last thirty years, and it is the scene of his much talked- 
of social experiments. 

Western Europe was long under the impression that 
Tourgenieff and Tolstoi were isolated apparitions on a 
bare stage. But as familiarity with Russian fiction in- 
creases in the West, we see the same structural growths 
proceeding in Russia as in the other countries of the 
v>/orld. The novel there, in its modern form, began to 
exist about 1840, and Gogol, whose Dead Souls ap- 
peared in 1842, was its creator. The "Men of the 
Forties," as they are called, arose out of the shadow of 
Gogol, and were young men when his book made its 
first profound sensation. The birth dates of GontcharofF, 
1 81 3, Tourgenieff, 1818, Pisemsky, 1820, and Dostoiefif- 
sky, 1 82 1, explain why these four illustrious novelists 
were aroused and fired by the publication of Dead Souls. 
It came to them, with its realism, its deep popular sym- 
pathy, and its strange humour, as a revelation at the 
very moment when the brain of a young man of genius 
is most incandescent. But Tolstoi, younger by seven 
years than the youngest of these, did not arrive at in- 
tellectual maturity till after the first ardour of the new 
life had passed away. Russia, in its rapid awakening, 
was a different place in 1850 from what it had been in 
1840, and to understand Tolstoi aright we must distin- 
guish him from the men of the Forties. 

In endeavouring to form an idea of the literary influ- 
ences which moulded his mind, we are likely to be more 
perplexed than aided by the strange book called Child" 



Count Lvof Tolstoi 



Jioody Boyhood^ Yoidhy which bears a striking relation to 
the recently published autobiography of the infancy and 
adolescence of Pierre Loti. In each book the portrait 
is so different from what, one is convinced, any other 
person, however observant and analytical, would have 
made of the child in question, that one is dubious how 
far the tale should be looked upon as a charming and 
unconscious fiction. In Tolstoi the little anecdote of 
the imaginary dream, the incidents of which by being 
repeated, grew to seem absolutely true, and moved the 
inventor to tears of self-pity, though given as a sign of 
scrupulous verity in autobiography, points to a tendency 
which is very natural and in a novelist very fortunate. 
But a strange fact is that these semi-mythical, in- 
tensely personal and curiously minute notes of the mind 
of a child were not made late in life, when the memory 
often recurs to the remotest past, but at the starting-point 
of the writer's career. Before he had started he stopped 
to look back, and he began in literature where most 
old men leave off. The Childhood^ Boyhood^ YoutJi^ was 
commenced as early as 185 1, before Tolstoi opened 
his brief adventure as a soldier. This book appears to 
be one of its author's favourites ; he was long caressing 
it before it first appeared, and he has entirely remoulded 
it once, if not twice. It is excessively ingenious, and 
one notes with interest that the first book which attracted 
the future agriculturist's attention was a treatise on the 
growing of cabbages. The analysis of the feelings of 
a nervous child has seldom been carried out in a more 
masterly fashion. But the book is often dull, 



I20 Critical Kit-Kats 

which the author's later work can hardly be accused 
of being. 



It was Caucasia, that Wunderland of Russian senti- 
ment and romance, which first awakened the ima- 
gination of Tolstoi. The Vicomte de Voglie, in his 
delightful chapter on the idealism of Russia, has shown 
us what a Byronic fascination was exercised by the 
moonlit gorges of the Caucasus on the poets of seventy 
years ago. It was to a province steeped in romantic 
melancholy, penetrated by reminiscences of Pouchkine 
and Lermantof, that Tolstoi, a spirit of a very different 
order, travelled in 185 1. Suddenly captured by the 
genius of the place, he enlisted in the army, and 
becc,me an officer of artillery in a mountain fortress 
over the Terek. Here he began to be an author, 
though he published none of his Caucasian studies till 
he had left the Caucasus, on the breaking out of the 
Turkish war, in 1853. The contrast between the 
Asiatic and himself is the first problem which moves 
him in the world of fiction. Now it is illustrated by 
Olenine, the victim of ennui, who flings himself into 
the friendship of the savage Orientals ; now by Jiline, 
who, unwillingly, and after a gallant struggle, is cap- 
tured and made to live among them, but ultimately 
casts his chains aside ; now by the gross and comfort- 
loving Kosteline, who pines away in the Tartar camp, 
and dies. In each case, though not always so roman- 
tically as in The Cossacks^ what interests the novelist is 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 121 

the difference of race and instinct, rendering the inner 
meaning of those outward trappings whose barbaric 
picturesqueness tempts him to loiter on its details. 
Tolstoi left the Caucasus a skilful writer, expert in the 
conduct of a narrative, but still tinged with the blue 
mist of romanticism. 

But he had hardly started on the three years' laborious 
campaign in which he was to learn so much of life, 
than there was published at home a book which revealed 
to Russian readers a new genius. Polikoiichka was 
issued in 1854, the year after The Cossacks appeared, 
and if it achieved a less popular success, it deserved 
closer attention. It may be that Tolstoi, who has filled 
wider canvasses, has never painted a genre-picture 
more thoroughly characteristic of himself than this 
study of manners on a large Russian estate. Poli 
koiichka is the story of a serf, who practises as a 
veterinary surgeon, but who is really a quack and a 
thief, through weakness and drink, since he is not 
essentially a bad fellow. His mistress, the Barina, q 
sentimentalist, pities him, and believes that if he went 
through an ordeal, on his honour, it might be the 
saving of him. Accordingly she sends him to a neigh- 
bouring town to fetch a large sum of money. Every 
one, even the man's own wife, believes that he will either 
steal it or squander it on drink. However, he starts, 
gets the money, returns faithfully, and just before 
reaching home loses it. Unable to face the shame of 
this discovery, he hangs himself, and the money is 
found, all safe, directly afterwards. 



122 Critical Kit-Kats 

We may take Polikouchka as typical of Tolstoi's 
work at this time. We first notice that, although the 
book is short and episodical, the author has lavished 
upon us an astounding number of types, all sharply 
defined. The recruiting scene in the Mir directly 
points to the skill with which the vast spaces of War 
and Peace were presently to be made to swarm with 
human life. Then the power of sustained analysis of 
the complex phenomena of character, in its stranger 
forms, is already seen to be completely developed. 
The mixture of vanity, cupidity, honour and stupidity 
which riots in the brain of Polikouchka as he drives off 
to fetch the money is described with a masterly effect, 
and in a manner peculiar to Tolstoi. Nor is this story 
less typical of its author in its general construction 
than in its specific features. In later years, indeed, 
Tolstoi rarely opens a tale with the sprightly gaiety of 
Polikouchka^ yet he has preserved the habit — he pre- 
serves it even in the Kreutzer Sonata — of beginning his 
stories with a scene of an amusing nature. In Poli- 
kouchka the tragical, the mystical element is delayed 
longer than has since been the author's wont, but it 
comes. The ghost of the suicide fingering about for 
the money in Doutlov's house on the fatal night is a 
signal for the conventionality of the tale, as a piece of 
literature, to break up, and this book, which began so 
gaily and with its feet so firmly planted on common 
life, closes in a scene of wild and scarcely intelligible 
saturnalia. 

Unless I am mistaken, and no exact bibliography of 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 123 

Tolstoi's writings seems to be at hand — the story which 
we call Katia (and the Russians Conjugal Happiness) 
was written while the novelist was still fighting the 
Turks. The extraordinary volume named Sketches from 
Sevastopol certainly belongs to this period. Totally 
distinct as these are — the one being a study of peaceful 
upper-class life on a Russian estate, the other reflecting 
the agitation and bewilderment of active war — they 
show an advance in intellectual power which takes 
much the same direction in either case. Tolstoi is now 
seen to be a clairvoyant of unexampled adroitness. If 
*' adroit " be thought an adjective incompatible with 
clairvoyance, it has at least not been used here without 
due consideration. The peculiar quality of Tolstoi's 
imagination seems to require this combined attribution 
of the intentional and the accidental. His most 
amazing feats in analysis are henceforth not strictly 
experimental, but conjectural. The feelings of Mik- 
hallov when the bomb burst, and he was wounded, 
may have been experienced ; those of Praskouchine, 
who was killed, can but have been created. Few 
readers have not been forced to acknowledge the 
amazing power of the passage last alluded to. But to 
call it realism, in the ordinary sense, is to rob it of 
half its value as a singularly lofty exercise of the 
imagination. Yet it is precisely in this aptitude for 
conjectural analysis that the occasion is presented for 
ambition to o'ervault itself. It is the mind that sees 
the non-experienced quite as clearly as the experienced, 
which is most liable to lose consciousness of the 



124 Critical Kit-Kats 

difference between reality and unreality. The spirit 
that " walks upon the winds with lightness " may step 
into the cloud of mysticism without having noticed its 
presence. 



The year 1858 was a great period of awakening in 
Russian fiction. It saw the publication of Gontcharoft's 
masterpiece, Oblomof; Pisemsky then rose to a height 
he was never to touch again in his great realistic novel, 
A Thousand Souls ; Tourgenieff produced his exquisite 
Assjaj and prepared the distinguished and pathetic 
surprise of his Nest of Nobles. Dostoieflfsky, still away 
in Siberia, was putting together his notes for the The 
House of the Dead. Tolstoi, plunged for the moment 
in the fashionable life of St. Petersburg and Moscow, 
could not be ignorant of this sudden revival of letters, 
nor unmoved by it. Hitherto he had been content to 
obtain striking effects within restricted limits. If his 
short stories had not always closed with artistic 
regularity, it was that he felt the true observer's dis- 
inclination to draw the strings together artificially. But 
he could be contented with small spaces no longer. 
His mind was now set on the production of works 
whose proportions should be properly related to the 
vast and complex mass of figures which was ever 
moving in procession under his eyelids. 

His next important publication. Three Deaths ^ which 
came out in 1859, resembles a bundle of studies by a 
great artist who contemplates a gigantic composition. 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 125 

The opening description of the sick lady in her 
carriage, travclHng in an atmosphere of eau-de-Cologne 
and dust, with its undemonstrative inventory of telling 
details, and its extreme sincerity of observation, is 
exactly like a page, like any page, from the two great 
novels which were to succeed it. But the volume is 
not without faults ; of three selected deaths, two should 
scarcely have been taken from the same class of the 
same sex. The final picture of the conscience-smitten 
coachman chopping a cross is not without a certain 
vagueness. We hurry on, since a book awaits us 
which drowns TJiree Deaths as a star is drowned in the 
sunrise. 

Tolstoi was thirty-two when he published his first 
great novel, War and Peace ^ in 1 860. Very soon after 
its appearance, he took himself out of society, and 
began his retirement at Yasnaya Polyana. For fifteen 
years the world heard comparatively little of him, 
and then he crowned the edifice of his reputation 
with the successive volumes oi Anna Karent'ne (iSy^- 
77). It is by these two epics of prose fiction, 
these massive productions, that he is mainly known. 
By degrees the fame of these amazing books passed 
beyond the ring of the Russian language, and now 
most educated persons in the West of Europe have 
read them. They dwarf all other novels by compari- 
son. The immense area of place and time which 
they occupy is unexampled, and the first thing which 
strikes us on laying them down is their comprehensive 
character. 



126 Critical Kit-Kats 

The work of no other novelist is so populous as that 
of Tolstoi. His books seem to include the entire 
existence of generations. In War and Peace we live 
with the characters through nearly a quarter of a 
century. They are young when we are introduced to 
them ; we accompany them through a hundred vicissi- 
tudes of disease and health, ill fortune and good, to 
death or to old age. There is no other novelist, whose 
name I can recall, who gives anything like this sense 
of presenting all that moves beneath the cope of 
heaven. Even Stendhal is dwarfed by Tolstoi, on his 
own ground; and the Russian novelist joins to this 
anthill of the soldier and the courtier, those other 
worlds of Richardson, of Balzac, of Thackeray. 
Through each of Tolstoi's two macrocosms, thronged 
with highly vitalised personages, walks one man more 
tenderly described and vividly presented than any of 
the others, the figure in whom the passions of the 
author himself are enshrined, Pierre Bezouchof in the 
one case, Levine in the other. This sort of hero, to 
whose glorification, however, the author makes no 
heroic concessions, serves to give a certain solidity and 
continuity to the massive narration. 

These two books are so widely known, that in so 
slight a sketch as this, their constitution may be taken 
as appreciated. Their magnificent fulness of life in 
movement, their sumptuous passages of description, 
their poignancy in pathos and rapidity in action, their 
unwavering devotion to veracity of impression, without 
squalor or emphasis — these qualities have given intel- 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 127 

lecUm] enjoyment of the highest kind to thousands of 
Engh'sh readers. They are panoramas rather than 
pictures, yet finished so finely and balanced so har- 
moniously that we forget the immense scale upon which 
they are presented, in our unflagging delight in the 
variety and vivacity of the scene. No novelist is less 
the slave of a peculiarity in one of his characters than 
Tolstoi. He loves to take an undeveloped being, such 
as Andr^ in War aiid Peace^ or Kitty Cherbatzky in 
Anna Karcninc, and to blow upon it with all the winds 
of heaven, patiently noting its revulsions and advances, 
its inconsistencies and transitions, until the whole 
metamorphosis of its moral nature is complete. There 
is no greater proof of the extraordinary genius of Count 
Tolstoi than this, that through the vast evolution of 
his plots, his characters, though ever developing and 
changing, always retain their distinct individuality. 
The hard metal of reflected life runs ductile through 
the hands of this giant of the imagination. 



IV 

In 1877 Anna Karcmne was finished, and the ap- 
plause with which it was greeted rang from one end of 
Russia to the other. But the author remained in un- 
broken seclusion at Yasnaya Polyana. He began to 
write another romance on the same colossal scale, this 
time taking up the history of Central Europe at a point 
somewhat subsequent to the close of War and Peace. 
Before he had written many chapters, that crisis, that 



128 Critical Kit-Kats 

social and religious conversion ensued, which has 
tinctured his life and work ever since. He threw his 
novel aside, and, at first, he was swallowed up in 
didactic activity, composing those volumes on religion, 
education, and sociology which have created so great a 
stir. But he has to some sHght degree, perhaps in 
answer to TourgeniefFs dying prayer, returned to the 
exercise of his talent, and has added new stories, 
most of them short, and most of them eccentric or 
mythical, to his repertory. He has composed very 
simple tales for children and peasants, and some of 
these are of a thrilling naiVetd. He has written, 
for older readers, A Poor Devil and The Death of Ivan 
Iliitch, 

To readers who desire a direct introduction to the 
work of Count Tolstoi no better volume can be recom- 
mended than that latest mentioned. It is an unsur- 
passed example of his naturalism, with its instinctive 
and yet imaginative interpretation of the most secret 
sentiments of the soul. It is piteously human; nay, 
the outcome of it all, pushed to its logical conclusion, 
is of a kind to break the very heart. Yet it is scarcely 
morbid, because wholesomely observed ; nor cynical, 
because interpenetrated with pity and love. Ivan 
Iliitch is a successful lawyer, rising to a brilliant and 
commanding position in the world, who sickens of an 
obscure internal complaint, and slowly dies. His in- 
stincts, his thoughts, are followed and evenly chronicled 
with extreme minuteness, till all is obscured in the 
final misery of dissolution. The feelings of the un- 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 129 

happy wretch himself, of his wife, children, servants, 
and friends, are rendered by Tolstoi with that curious 
clairvoyance which we have seen to be his cardinal 
gift. 

In reflecting upon such a book as The Death of Ivan 
Iliitch, it is natural to ask ourselves in what the realism 
of Tolstoi consists, and how it differs from that of 
M. Zola and Mr. Hov/ells. In the first place, their 
habit of producing an impression by exhaustingly re- 
cording all the details which it is possible to observe 
is not his. Tolstoi, if they are called realists, should 
be styled an impressionist, not in the sense used by 
the artists of the present moment, but as Bastien 
Lepage was an impressionist in painting. If Zola and 
Howells fill the canvas with details to its remotest 
corner, Tolstoi concentrates his attention upon one 
figure or group, and renders the effect of that single 
object with a force and minute exactitude, which is 
positively amazing, and which far surpasses theirs. 
Of course, a book on such a scale as War and Peace 
would not have been conducted to a close at all if the 
Zola method had been brought to bear upon it. But 
an examination of Tolstoi's short tales will show that 
even when he has no need of husbanding space he 
adopts the same impressionist manner. With him, 
though observation is vivid, imagination is more 
vigorous still, and he cannot be tied down to describe 
more than he chooses to create. 

This may serve to explain why his style sometimes 
seems so negligent, and even confused, and why his 

I 



130 Critical Kit-Kats 

stories invariably present lacunce^ blank omissions 
where the writer has simply overlooked a series of 
events. The progress of Anna's mind, for example, 
from after her first meeting with Wronsky to the 
original formation of her infatuated feeling for him, is 
a hiatus. For some reason or other, it did not interest 
the novelist, and he blandly omitted to touch it. His 
lapses of memory, his negligence, may likewise account 
for the tedious and interminable length at which certain 
episodes are treated. There are some country scenes 
in Anna Karenine^ in the course of which the author 
seems to have gone to sleep, and to be writing on 
automatically. Occasionally, Tolstoi's love of what is 
real leads him to distinct puerility, as in The Story of 
a Horse, where the satire, and something in the very 
tone of the narrator's voice remind us, but not favour- 
ably, of Hans Andersen. Yet these are slight points, 
and they simply indicate the limits of a very noble 
genius. 

The realists in Russia, as well as elsewhere, have 
given us many good gifts — they have awakened our 
observation, have exposed our hallucinations, have 
shattered our absurd illusions. It is mere injustice to 
deny that they have been seekers after truth and life, 
and that sometimes they have touched both the one 
and the other. But one great gift has commonly eluded 
their grasp. In their struggle for reality and vividness, 
they have too often been brutal, or trivial, or sordid. 
Tolstoi is none of these. As vital as any one of them 
all, he is what they are not — distinguished. His radical 



Count Lyof Tolstoi 131 

optimism, his belief in the beauty and nobihty of the 
human race, preserve him from the Scylla and the 
Charybdis of naturaHsm, from squalor and insipidity. 
They secure for his best work that quality of personal 
distinction which does more than anything else to give 
durability to imaginative literature. 

1890. 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 



Christina Rossetti 

Woman, for some reason which seems to have 
escaped the philosopher, has never taken a very pro- 
minent position in the history of poetry. But she has 
rarely been absent altogether from any great revival oi 
poetic literature. The example of her total absence 
which immediately flies to the recollection is the most 
curious of all. That Shakespeare should have had no 
female rival, that the age in which music burdened 
every bough, and in which poets made their appear- 
ance in hundreds, should have produced not a solitary 
authentic poetess, even of the fifth rank, this is curious 
indeed. But it is as rare as curious, for though women 
have not often taken a very high position on Parnassus, 
they have seldom thus wholly absented themselves. 
Even in the iron age of Rome, where the Muse seemed 
to bring forth none but male children, we find, bound 
up with the savage verses of Juvenal and Persius, those 
seventy lines of pure and noble indignation against the 
brutality of Domitian which alone survive to testify to 
the genius of Sulpicia. 

If that distinguished lady had come down to us in 
seventy thousand verses instead of seventy lines, would 
her fame have been greatly augmented ? Probably 



136 Critical Kit-Kats 

not. So far as we can observe, the strength of the 
great poet-women has been in their selection. Not 
a single poetess whose fame is old enough to base a 
theory upon has survived in copious and versatile 
numbers. Men like Dryden and Victor Hugo can- 
strike every chord of the lyre, essay every mode and 
species of the art, and impress us by their bulk and 
volume. One very gifted and ambitious Englishwoman 
of the last generation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 
essayed to do the same. But her success, it must be 
admitted, grows every day more dubious. Where she 
strove to be passionate she was too often hysterical ; 
a sort of scream spoils the effect of all her full tirades. 
She remains readable mainly where she is exquisite, 
and one small volume would suffice to contain her pro- 
bable bequest to posterity. 

It is no new theory that women, in order to succeed 
in poetry, must be brief, personal, and concentrated. 
This was recognised by the Greek critics themselves. 
Into that delicious garland of the poets which was 
woven by Meleager to be hung outside the gate of the 
Gardens of the Hesperides he admits but two women 
from all the centuries of Hellenic song. Sappho is 
there, indeed, because " though her flowers were few, 
they were all roses," and, almost unseen, a single 
virginal shoot of the crocus bears the name of Erinna. 
That was all that womanhood gave of durable poetry 
to the literature of antiquity. A critic, writing five 
hundred years after her death, speaks of still hearing 
the swan-note of Erinna clear above the jangling chatter 



Christina Rossetti 137 

of the jays, and of still thinking those three hundred 
hexameter verses sung by a girl of nineteen as lovely 
as the loveliest of Homer's. Even at the time of the 
birth of Christ, Erinna's writings consisted of what 
could be printed on half a dozen pages of this volume. 
The whole of her extant work, and of Sappho's too, 
could now be pressed into a newspaper column. But 
their fame lives on, and of Sappho, at least, enough 
survives to prove beyond a shadow of doubt the lofty 
inspiration of her genius. She is the type of the 
woman-poet who exists not by reason of the variety or 
volume of her work, but by virtue of its intensity, its 
individuality, its artistic perfection. 

At no time was it more necessary to insist on this 
truth than it is to-day. The multiplication of books of 
verse, the hackneyed character of all obvious notation 
of life and feeling, should, one would fancy, tend to 
make our poets more exiguous, more concise, and more 
trimly girt. There are few men nowadays from whom 
an immense flood of writing can be endured without 
fatigue ; few who can hold the trumpet to their lips for 
hours in the market-place without making a desert 
around them. Yet there never was a time when the 
pouring out of verse was less restrained within bounds. 
Everything that occurs to the poet seems, to-da}', to 
be worth writing down and printing. The result is 
the neglect of really good and charming work, which 
misses all effect because it is drowned in stuff that is 
second- or third-rate. The women who write, in 
particular, pursued by that commercial fervour which is 



138 Critical Kit-Kats 

so curious a feature of our new literary life, dnd which 
sits so inelegantly on a female figure, are in a ceaseless 
hurry to work off and hurry away into oblivion those 
qualities of their style which might, if seriously and 
coyly guarded, attract a permanent attention. 

Among the women who have written verse in the 
Victorian age there is not one by whom this reproach 
is less deserved than it is by Miss Rossetti. Severely 
true to herself, an artist of conscientiousness as high as 
her skill is exquisite, she has never swept her fame to 
sea in a flood of her own outpourings. In the follow- 
ing pages I desire to pay no more than a just tribute of 
respect to one of the most perfect poets of the age — 
not one of the most powerful, of course, nor one of the 
most epoch-making, but to one of the most perfect — 
to a writer toward whom we may not unreasonably 
expect that students of English literature in the twenty- 
fourth century may look back as the critics of Alexandria 
did toward Sappho and toward Erinna. 

So much has been written, since the untimely death 
of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on the circumstances of his 
family history, that it is not requisite to enter very 
fully into that subject in the present sketch of his 
youngest sister. It is well known that the Italian poet 
Gabriele Rossetti, after a series of romantic adventures 
endured in the cause of liberty, settled in London, and 
married the daughter of another Italian exile, G. 
Polidori, Lord Byron's physician. From this stock, 
three-fourths of which was purely Italian, there sprang 
four children, of whom Dante Gabriel was the second, 



Christina Rossetti 139 

and Christina Gcorgina, born in December, i(S30, the 
youngest. There was nothing in the training of these 
children which foreshadowed their various distinction 
in the future ; although the transplanted blood ran 
quicker, no doubt, in veins that must now be called 
English, not Italian, even as the wine-red anemone 
broke into flower from the earth that was carried to 
the Campo Santo out of Palestine. 

We cannot fathom these mysteries of transplantation. 
No doubt a thousand Italian families might settle in 
London, and their children be born as deaf to melody 
and as blind to Nature as their playfellows long native 
to Hoxton or Clerkenwell. Yet it is not possible to 
hold it quite an accident that this thousand and first 
family discovered in London soil the precise chemical 
qualities that made its Italian fibre break into clusters 
of blossom. Gabriel Rossetti, both as poet and painter, 
remained very Italian fo the last, but his sister is a 
thorough Englishwoman. Unless I make a great mis- 
take, she has scarcely visited Italy, and in her poetry 
the landscape and the observation of Nature are not 
only English, they are so thoroughly local that I doubt 
whether there is one touch in them all which proves 
her to have strayed more than fifty miles from London 
in any direction. I have no reason for saying so 
beyond internal evidence, but I should be inclined 
to suggest that the county of Sussex alone is 
capable of having supplied all the imagery which Miss 
Rossetti's poems contain. Her literary repertory, 
too, seems purely English ; there is hardly a solitary 



140 Critical Kit-Kats 

touch in her work which betrays her transalpine 
parentage. 

In a letter to myself, in words which she kindly lets 
me give to the public, Miss Rossetti has thus summed 
up some valuable impressions of her earliest bias toward 
writing : 

'' For me, as well as for Gabriel, whilst our ' school' 
was everything, it was no one definite thing. I, as 
the least and last of the group, may remind you that 
besides the clever and cultivated parents who headed 
us all, I in particular beheld far ahead of myself the 
clever sister and two clever brothers who were a little 
(though but a little) my seniors. And as to acquire- 
ments, I lagged out of all proportion behind them, and 
have never overtaken them to this day." 

I interrupt my distinguished friend to remark that, 
even if we do not take this modest declaration with a 
grain of salt, it is interesting to find one more example 
of the fact that the possession of genius by no means 
presupposes a nature apt for what are called acquire- 
ments. Miss Rossetti proceeds : 

*' If any one thing schooled me in the direction of 
poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to 
prowl all alone about my grandfather's cottage-grounds 
some thirty miles from London, entailing in my child- 
hood a long stage-coach journey ! This privilege came 
to an end when I was eight years old, if not earlier. 
The grounds were quite small, and on the simplest 
scale — but in those days to me they were vast, varied, 
worth exploring. After those charming holidays ended 



Christina Rossetti 141 

I remained pent up in London till I was a great girl of 
fourteen, when delight reawakened at the sight of 
primroses in a railway cutting, — a prelude to many 
lovely country sights." 

My impression is that a great deal of judicious 
neglect was practised in the Rossetti family, and that, 
like so many people of genius, the two poets, brother 
and sister, contrived to evade the educational mill. 
From the lips of Miss Christina herself I have it that 
all through her early girlhood she lay as a passive 
weight on the hands of those who invited her to explore 
those bosky groves called arithmetic, grammar, and 
the use of the globes. In Mr. R. L. Stevenson's little 
masterpiece of casuistry called On Idlers and Idlings 
he has discussed the temper of mind so sympathetically 
that I will say no more than this, that Philistia never 
will comprehend the certain fact that, to genius, Chapter 
VI., which is primroses in a railway cutting, is often 
far more important than Chapter XIII., which happens 
to be the subjunctive mood. But for these mysteries 
of education I must refer the ingenuous reader to Mr. 
Stevenson's delightful pages. 

From her early childhood Miss Rossetti seems to 
have prepared herself for the occupation of her life, 
the art of poetry. When she was eleven her verses 
began to be noticed and preserved, and an extremely 
rare little volume, the very cynosure of Victorian 
bibliography, permits us to observe the development of 
her talent. One of the rarest of books — when it occa- 
sionally turns up at sales it commands an extravagant 



142 Critical Kit-Kats 

price — is Verses by Christina G. Rosseth] privately 
printed in 1847, at the press of her grandfather Mr. G. 
Polidori, " at No. 15, Park Village East, Regent's Park, 
London." This little volume of sixty-six pages, dedi- 
cated to the author's mother, and preceded by a pretty 
little preface signed by Mr. Polidori, is a curious revela- 
tion of the evolution of the poet's genius. There is 
hardly one piece in it which Miss Rossetti would choose 
to reprint in a collected edition of her works, but there 
are many which possess the greatest interest to a 
student of her mature style. The earliest verses — 
since all are dated — show us merely the child's desire 
for expression in verse, for experiment in rhyme and 
meter. Gradually we see the buddings of an individual 
manner, and in the latest piece, '* The Dead City," the 
completion of which seems to have led to the printing 
of the little collection, we find the poet assuming some- 
thing of her adult manner. Here are some stanzas 
from this rarest of booklets, which will be new, in every 
probability, to all my readers, and in these we detect, 
unmistakably, the accents of the future author of 
Goblin Market: 

In green emerald baskets were 
Sun-red apples^ streaked and fair s 
Here the nectarine and peach. 
And ripe plum lay, and on each 
The bloom rested everywhere. 

Grapes were hanging overhead^ 
Purple, pale^ and ruby-red, 



Christina Rossetti 143 

And in the panniers all around 
Yellow melons shone ^ fresh-found. 
With the dew upon them spread. 

And the apricot and pear. 
And the pulpy fig were there. 

Cherries and dark mulberries^ 

Bunchy currants, strawberries. 
And the lemon wan and fair. 

By far the best and most characteristic of all her 
girlish verses, however, are those contained in a long 
piece entitled " Divine and Human Pleading," dated 
1846. It is a pleasure to be the first to publish a 
passage which the author needs not blush to own after 
nearly fifty years, every stanza of which bears the 
stamp of her peculiar manner : 

A woman stood beside his bed : 

Her breath was fragrance all ; 
Round her the light was very bright, 

The air was musical. 

Her footsteps shone upon the stars, 

Her robe was spotless white ; ' 
Her breast was radiant with the Cross, 

Her head with living light. 

Her eyes beamed with a sacred fire. 

And on her shoulders fair. 
From underneath her golden crown. 

Clustered her golden hair. 



144 Critical Kit-Kats 

Tet on her bosom her white hands 

Were folded quietly : 
Yet was her glorious head bowed low 

In deep humility. 

In these extracts from the volume of 1847 we see 
more than the germ ; we see the imperfect development 
of two qualities which have particularly characterised 
the poetry of Miss Rossetti — in the first an entirely 
direct and vivid mode of presenting to us the impression 
of richly coloured physical objects, a feat in which she 
sometimes rivals Keats and Tennyson ; and in the 
second a brilliant simplicity in the conduct of episodes 
of a visionary character, and a choice of expression 
which is exactly in keeping with these, a sort of Tuscan 
candour, as of a sacred picture in which each saint or 
angel is robed in a dress of one unbroken colour. 
These two qualities combined, in spite of cheir apparent 
incompatibility — an austere sweetness coupled with a 
luscious and sensuous brightness — to form one side of 
Miss Rossetti's curious poetic originality. 

Three years later, in 1850, she was already a finished 
poet. That charming and pathetic failure. The Germ^ 
a forlorn little periodical which attempted to emanate 
from the new group of Preraphaelites, as they called 
themselves, counted her among its original contri- 
butors. Her brother Gabriel, indeed, who had already 
written, in its earliest form, his remarkable poem of 
The Blessed Damozel, was the central force and prime 
artificer of the movement, which had begun about a 



Christina Rossetti 145 

year before. It was a moment of transition in English 
poetry. The old race was dying in its last representa- 
tive, Wordsworth. Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Browning, Miss 
Barrett were the main figures of the day, while the 
conscience of young men and women addicted to verse 
was troubled with a variety of heresies, the malignity 
of which is hardly to be realised by us after fifty years. 
Mr. Bailey's Festus was a real power for evil, strong 
enough to be a momentary snare to the feet of Tenny- 
son in writing Maud, and even of Browning. A host 
of **Spasmodists," as they were presently called, suc- 
ceeded in appalling the taste of the age with their vast 
and shapeless tragedies, or monodramas. 

Then, with a different voice, but equally far removed 
from the paths of correct tradition in verse, came Clough, 
singing in slovenly hexameters of Oxford and the plea- 
sures of radical undergraduates in highland bothies. 
Clough, with his hold on reality, and his sympathetic 
modern accent, troubled the Preraphaelites a little ; they 
were less moved by a far more pure and exquisite music, 
a song as of Simonides himself, which also reached them 
from Oxford, when Matthew Arnold, in 1849, made 
his first appearance with his lovely and long neglected 
Strayed Reveller. Mr. Coventry Patmore, with his 
Poems of 1844, was a recognised elder brother of their 
own, and almost everything else which was to be well 
done in verse for many years was to arise from among 
themselves, or in emulation of them. So that never 
was periodical better named than The Germ, the seed 
which put tortn two cotyledons, and then called itself 

K 



146 Critical Kit-Kats 

Aii: and Letters; and put lorth two more little leaves, 
and then seemed to die. 

Among the anonymous contributions to the first 
number of The Germ — that for January, 1850 — are two 
which we know to be Miss Rossetti's. These are, 
" Where Sunless Rivers Weep," and " Love, Strong 
as Death, is Dead." In the February number, under 
the pseudonym of Ellen Alleyn, she printed "A Pause 
of Thought," the song, " Oh, Roses for the Flush of 
Youth," and " I said of Laughter, It is Vain." To the 
March number, then styled Art and Letters^ Ellen 
Alleyn contributed a long piece called '' Repining," 
which does not seem to have been reprinted, and 
*' Sweet Death " (" The Sweetest Blossoms Die "). To 
the fourth and last number, in which an alien and far 
more commonplace influence may be traced than in the 
others, she contributed nothing. Of her seven pieces, 
however, printed in The Germ in 1850, when she was 
twenty, there are five (if we omit **A Pause of 
Thought" and "Repining") which rank to this day 
among her very finest lyrics, and display her style as 
absolutely formed. Though the youngest poet of the 
confraternity, she appears indeed in The Germ as the 
most finished, and even, for the moment, the most 
promising, since her brother Gabriel, if the author of 
The Blessed Damozel, was also responsible for those 
uncouth Flemish studies in verse which he very wisely 
refused in later years to own or to republish. 

Time passed, and the obscure group of boys and 
girls who called themselves Preraphaelites found them- 



Christina Rossetti 147 

selves a centre of influence and curiosity. In poetry, 
as in painting and sculpture, they conquered, and more 
readily, perhaps, in their pupils than in themselves. 
The first independent publications of the school, at 
least, came from visitors who had been children in 
1850. These books were scarcely noticed by the 
public ; if Mr. Morris's Defence of Guinevere attracted 
a few readers in 1858, Mr. Swinburne's Queeji Mother 
fell still-born from the press in i860. These prepared 
the way for real and instantaneous successes — for Miss 
Rossetti's Goblin Market in 1862, for Mr. Woolner's 
My Beautiful Lady \vi 1863, for Mr. Swinburne's dazzling 
Atalanta in Calydon in 1865. At last, in 1870, there 
tardily appeared, after such expectation and tiptoe 
curiosity as have preceded no other book in our gene- 
ration, the Poems of Gabriel Rossetti. 

It is with these poets that Miss Rossetti takes her 
historical position, and their vigour and ambition had a 
various influence upon her style. On this side there 
can be no doubt that association with men so Learned 
and eager, so daring in experiment, so well equipped 
in scholarship, gave her an instant and positive advan- 
tage. By nature she would seem to be of a cloistered 
and sequestered temper, and her genius was lifted on 
this wave of friendship to heights which it would not 
have dreamed of attempting alone. On the other hand, 
it is possible that, after the first moment, this associa- 
tion with the strongest male talent of the time has not 
been favourable to public appreciation of her work. 
Critics have taken for granted that she was a satellite, 



148 Critical Kit-Kats 

and have been puzzled to notice her divergences from 
the type. Of these divergences the most striking is the 
religious one. Neither Gabriel Rossetti, nor Mr. Swin- 
burne, nor Mr. Morris has shown any sympathy with, 
or any decided interest in, the tenets of Protestantism. 
Now Miss Christina Rossetti's poetry is not merely 
Christian and Protestant, it is Anglican ; nor her divine 
works only, but her secular also, bear the stamp of 
uniformity with the doctrines of the Church of England. 
What is very interesting in her poetry is the union of 
this fixed religious faith with a hold upon physical 
beauty and the richer parts of Nature which allies her 
with her brother and with their younger friends. She 
does not shrink from strong delineation of the pleasures 
of life even when she is denouncing them. In one of 
the most austere of her sacred pieces, she describes the 
Children of the World in these glowing verses : 

Milk-white, wine-fiushed, among the vines ^ 
Up and down leaping^ to and fro. 
Most glad, most full, made strong with wines y 
Blooming as peaches fear led with dew, 
Their golden windy hair afloat, 
Love-music warbling in their throat, 
Toung men and women come and go. 

There is no Hterary hypocrisy here, no pretence that 
the apple of life is full of ashes ; and this gives a start- 
ling beauty, the beauty of artistic contrast, to the poet's 
studies in morality. Miss Rossetti, indeed, is so 
didactic in the undercurrent of her mind, so anxious to 



Christina Rossetti 149 

adorn her tale with a religious moral, that she needs 
all her art, all her vigorous estimate of physical love- 
liness, to make her poetry delightful as poetry. That 
she does make it eminently delightful merely proves 
her extraordinary native gift. The two long pieces she 
has written, her two efforts at a long breath, are 
sustained so well as to make us regret that she has not 
put out her powers in the creation of a still more com- 
plete and elaborated composition. Of these two poems 
Goblin Market is by far the more popular ; the qther, 
The Princess Progress, v/hich appeared in 1866, has 
never attracted such attention as it deserves. 

It is not necessary to describe a poem so well known 
to every lover of verse as Goblin Market. It is one of 
the very few purely fantastic poems of recent times 
which have really kept up the old tradition of humoresque 
literature. Its witty and fantastic conception is em- 
broidered with fancies, descriptions, peals of laughing 
music, which clothe it as a queer Japanese figure may 
be clothed with brocade, so that the entire effect at last 
is beautiful and harmonious without ever having ceased 
to be grotesque. I confess that while I dimly perceive 
the underlying theme to be a didactic one, and nothing 
less than the sacrifice of self by a sister to recuperate a 
sister's virtue, I cannot follow the parable through all its 
delicious episodes. Like a Japanese work of art, again, 
one perceives the general intention, and one is satisfied 
with the beauty of all the detail, without comprehending 
or wishing to comprehend every part of the execution. 
For instance, the wonderful scene in which Lizzie sits 



150 Critical Kit-Kats 

beleaguered by the goblins, and receives with hard-shut 
mouth all the syrups that they squeeze against her skin 
— this from the point of view of poetry is perfect, and 
needs no apology or commentary; but its place in the 
parable it would, surely, be extremely hard to find. 
It is therefore, astonishing to me that the general public, 
that strange and unaccountable entity, has chosen to 
prefer Goblin Market, which we might conceive to be 
written for poets alone, to The Prince's Progress, where 
the parable and the teaching are as clear as noonday. 
The prince is a handsome, lazy fellow, who sets out late 
upon his pilgrimage, loiters in bad company by the 
way, is decoyed by light loves, and the hope of life, 
and the desire of wealth, and reaches his destined 
bride at last, only to find her dead. This has an obvious 
moral, but it is adorned with verse of the very highest 
romantic beauty. Every claim which criticism has to 
make for the singular merit of Miss Rossetti might be 
substantiated from this little-known romance, from 
which I must resist the pleasure of quoting more than 
a couple of stanzas descriptive of daybreak : 

jlt the death of night and the birth of day ^ 

When the owl left off his sober play, 

And the bat hung himself out of the way,-^ 

Woke the song of mavis and merle^ 
And heaven put off its hodden grey 
For mother-d -pearl. 

Peeped up daisies here and there^ 
Here^ there^ and everywhere : 



Christina Rossetti 151 

Rose a hopeful lark in the air^ 

Spreading out towards the sun his breast ; 
While the moon set solemn and fair 
Away in the West. 

With the apparent exceptions of Goblin Market and 
The Princess Progress, both of which indeed are of a 
lyrical nature, Miss Rossetti has written only lyrics. 
All poets are unequal, except the bad ones, who are 
uniformly bad. Miss Rossetti indulges in the privilege 
which Wordsworth, Burns, and so many great masters 
have enjoyed, of writing extremely flat and dull poems 
at certain moments, and of not perceiving that they are 
dull or flat. She does not erf in being mediocre ; her 
l3nncs are bad or good, and the ensuing remarks deal 
with that portion only of her poems with which criticism 
is occupied in surveying work so admirably original as 
hers, namely, that which is worthy of her reputation. 
Her lyrics, then, are eminent for their glow of colour- 
ing, their vivid and novel diction, and for a certain 
penetrating accent, whether in joy or pain, which rivets 
the attention. Her habitual tone is one of melancholy 
reverie, the pathos of which is strangely intensified by 
her appreciation of beauty and pleasure. There is not 
a chord of the minor key in " A Birthday," and yet the 
impression which its cumulative ecstasy leaves upon 
the nerves is almost pathetic : 

My heart is like a singing- bird 
Whose nest is in a watered shoot; 



152 Critical Kit-Kats 

My heart is like an apple-tree 

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit ; 
My heart is like a rainbow-shell 

That paddles in a halcyon sea; 
My heart is gladder than all these 

Because my love is come to me. 

Raise me a dais of silk and down ; 

Hang it with vair and purple dyes s 
Carve it in doves and pomegranates. 

And peacocks with a hundred eyes ; 
Work it in gold and silver grapes^ 

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys ; 
Because the birthday of my life 

Is come, my love is come to me. 

It is very rarely, indeed, that the poet strikes so jubilant 
a note as this. Her customary music is sad, often 
poignantly sad. Her lyrics have that desideriiim^ that 
obstinate longing for something lost out of life, which 
Shelley's have, although her Christian faith gives her 
regret a more resigned and sedate character than his 
possesses. In the extremely rare gift of song-writing 
Miss Rossetti has been singularly successful. Of the 
poets of our time she stands next to Lord Tennyson in 
this branch of the art, in the spontaneous and complete 
quality of her lieder^ and in their propriety for the purpose 
of being sung. At various times this art has flourished 
in our race ; eighty years ago, most of the poets could 
write songs, but it is almost a lost art in our generation. 
The songs of our living poets are apt to be over- 



Christina Rossetti 153 

polished or under-polished, so simple as to be bald, or 
else so elaborate as to be wholly unsuitable for singing. 
But such a song as this is not unworthy to be classed 
with the melodies of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Shelley : 

Oh^ roses for the jiush of youth. 

And laurel for the perfect prime ; 
But pluck an ivy-branch for me 

Grown old before my time. 

Oh, violets for the grave of youth. 

And bay for those dead in their prime ; 

Give me the withered leaves I chose 
Before in the old time. 

Her music is very delicate, and it is so small praise 
to her that she it is who, of hving verse-writers, has 
left the strongest mark on the metrical nature of that 
miraculous artificer of verse, Mr. Swinburne. In his 
Poems and Ballads, as other critics have long ago 
pointed out, as was shown when that volume first 
appeared, several of Miss Rossetti's discoveries were 
transferred to his more scientific and elaborate system 
of harmonies, and adapted to more brilliant effects. 
The reader of Mr. Swinburne would judge that of all 
his immediate contemporaries Miss Rossetti and the 
late Mr. FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, 
had been those who had influenced his style the most. 
Miss Rossetti, however, makes no pretence to elaborate 
metrical effects ; she is even sometimes a little na'ive, 
a little careless, in her rough, rhymeless endings, and 



154 Critical Kit-Kats 

metrically her work was better in her youth than it 
has been since. 

The sonnets present points of noticeable interest. 
They are few, but they are of singular excellence. 
They have this peculiarity, that many of them are 
objective. Now the great bulk of good sonnets is 
purely subjective — occupied with reverie, with regret, 
with moral or rehgious enthusiasm. Even the cele- 
brated sonnets of Gabriel Rossetti will be found to be 
mainly subjective. On the question of the relative merit 
of the sonnets of the brother and the sister, I hold a view 
in which I believe that few will at present coincide ; 
I am certain Miss Rossetti herself will not. If she 
honours me by reading these pages, she may possibly 
recollect a conversation, far more important to me of 
course than to her, which we held in 1870, soon after 
I had first the privilege of becoming known to her. I 
was venturing to praise her sonnets, when she said, 
with the sincerity of evident conviction, that they 
** could only be admired before Gabriel, by printing his 
in the Fortnightly Review, showed the source of their 
inspiration." I was sure then, and I am certain now, 
that she was wrong. The sonnets are not the product 
of, they do not even bear any relation to those of, her 
brother. 

Well do I recollect the publication of these sonnets 
of Gabriel Rossetti, in 1869, when, at a moment when 
curiosity regarding the mysterious painter-poet was at 
its height, they suddenly blossomed forth in a certain 
number of the Fortnightly Review^ in whose solemn 



Christina Rossetti 155 

pages we were wont to see nothing lighter or more 
literary than esoteric politics and the prose mysteries 
of positivism. We were dazzled by their Italian 
splendour of phraseology, amazed that such sonorous 
anapests, that such a burst of sound, should be caged 
within the sober limits of the sonnet, fascinated by 
the tenderness of the long-drawn amorous rhetoric ; 
but there were some of us who soon recovered an 
equilibrium of taste, in which it seemed that the 
tradition of the English sonnet, its elegance of phrase, 
its decorum of movement, were too rudely dis;^laced by 
this brilliant Italian intruder, and that underneath the 
melody and the glowing diction, the actual thought, 
the valuable and intelligible residue of poetry, was too 
often much more thin than Rossetti allowed it to be 
in the best of his other poems. As to Gabriel Rossetti's 
sonnets being his own best work, as has been asserted, 
I for one must entirely and finally disagree. I believe 
that of all his poetry they form the section which will 
be the first to tarnish. Quite otherwise is it with Miss 
Christina Rossetti. It is in certain of her objective 
sonnets that her touch is most firm and picturesque, 
her intelligence most weighty, and her style most 
completely characteristic. The reader need but turn 
to " After Death," "On the Wing," "Venus's Looking- 
Glass" (in the volume of 1875), and the marvellous 
**A Triad"* to concede the truth of this ; while in the 



♦ Why has Miss Rossetti allowed this piece, one of the gems of the volume 
of 1862, to drop out of her collected poems? 



156 Critical Kit-Kats 

more obvious subjective manner of sonnet-writing she 
is one of the most successful poets of our time. In 
" The World," where she may be held to come closest to 
her brother as a sonneteer, she seems to me to surpass 
him. 

From the first a large section of Miss Rossetti's work 
has been occupied with sacred and devotional themes. 
Through this most rare and difficult department of the 
art, which so few essay without breaking on the Scylla 
of doctrine on the one hand, or being whirled in the 
Charybdis of commonplace dulness on the other, she 
has steered with extraordinary success. Her sacred 
poems are truly sacred, and yet not unpoetical. As a 
religious poet of our time she has no rival but Cardinal 
Newman, and it could only be schismatic prejudice or 
absence of critical faculty which should deny her a 
place, as a poet, higher than that of our exquisite master 
of prose. To find her exact parallel it is at once her 
strength and her snare that we must go back to the 
middle of the seventeenth century. She is the sister of 
George Herbert ; she is of the family of Crashaw, of 
Vaughan, of Wither. The metrical address of Herbert 
has been perilously attractive to her ; the broken stanzas 
of " Consider " or of " Long Barren " remind us of the 
age when pious aspirations took the form of wings, or 
hour-glasses, or lamps of the temple. The most thrill- 
ing and spirited of her sacred poems have been free 
from these Marini-like subtleties. There is only what 
is best in the quaint and fervent school of Herbert 
visible in such pieces as **The Three Enemies," *'A 



Christina Rossetti 157 

Rose Plant in Jericho," " Passing Away, saith the World," 
and ** Up Hill." Still more completely satisfactory, 
perhaps, is " Amor Mundi," first included in the Poems 
of 1875, which takes rank as one of the most solemn, 
imaginative, and powerful lyrics on a purely religious 
subject ever printed in England. 



These critical and biographical remarks were mainly 
written in 1882, but not printed until 1893. They were 
undertaken at the suggestion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
who was kind enough to consider that I had an appre- 
ciation of his sister such as is more common now than 
fourteen years ago. They were scarcely finished when 
the news came of his death, and in the agitation pro- 
duced by that event, I thought it better to put aside for 
a time my criticism of Christina. 

It will, perhaps, be not inappropriate for me to record 
here my few personal recollections of this illustrious 
lady. It was not my privilege to meet her more than 
some dozen times in the flesh, and those times mainly 
in the winter of 1870-71. But on most of those occa- 
sions I had the good fortune to converse with her for a 
long while ; and up to a few months before her death 
we corresponded at not particularly distant intervals. 
She is known to the world, and very happily known, by 
her brother's portraits of her, and in particular by the 
singularly beautiful chalk drawing in profile, dated i Z66. 
I think that tasteful arrangement of dress might have 
made her appear a noble and even a romantic figure so 



158 Critical Kit-Kats 

late as 1870, but, as I suppose, an ascetic or almost 
methodistical reserve caused her to clothe herself in a 
style, or with an absence of style, which was really 
distressing; her dark hair was streaked across her olive 
forehead, and turned up in a chignon ; the high stiff 
dress ended in a hard collar and plain brooch, the 
extraordinarily ordinary skirt sank over a belated crino- 
line, and these were inflictions hard to bear from the 
high-priestess of PreraphaeHtism. When it is added 
that her manner, from shyness, was of a portentious 
solemnity, that she had no small talk whatever, and 
that the common topics of the day appeared to be 
entirely unknown to her, it will be understood that she 
was considered highly formidable by the young and the 
flighty. I have seen her sitting alone, in the midst of 
a noisy drawing-room, like a pillar of cloud, a Sibyl 
whom no one had the audacity to approach. 

Yet a kinder or simpler soul, or one less concentrated 
on self, or of a humbler sweetness, never existed. And 
to an enthusiast, who broke the bar of conventional 
chatter, and ventured on real subjects, her heart seemed 
to open like an unsealed fountain. The heavy lids of 
her weary-looking, bistred, Italian eyes would lift and 
display her ardour as she talked of the mysteries of 
poetry and religion. My visits to her, in her mother's 
house, 56 Euston Square, were abruptly brought to a 
close. On May I, 1 87 1, I received a note from her elder 
sister Maria warning me not to dine with them on the 
following Tuesday, as her sister was suddenly and 
alarmingly ill. This was, in fact, the mysterious com- 



Christina Rossetti 159 

plaint which thenceforth kept Christina bedridden, and 
sometimes at the point of death, for two years. She 
recovered, but the next time I saw her — she was well 
enough to be working in the British Museum in the 
summer of 1873 — she was so strangely altered as to be 
scarcely recognisable. 

By degrees, to my great satisfaction, Miss Christina 
came to look upon me as in some little sense her 
champion in the press. *'The pen you use for me has 
always a soft rather than a hard nib," she said, and in 
truth, whenever I found an opportunity of praising her 
pure and admirable poems, I was not slow to employ 
it. That I w^as not exempt, however, from an occasional 
peck even from this gentlest of turtle-doves, a letter 
(written in December 1 875) reminds me. I had reviewed 
somewhere the first collected edition of her Pocms^ 
and I had ventured to make certain reservations. 
There are some points of valuable self-analysis which 
make a part of this letter proper to be quoted here : 

" Save me from my friends I You are certainly up 
in your subject, and as I might have fared worse in 
other hands I will not regret that rival reviewer [jMr. 
Theodore Watts] who was hindered from saying his 
say. As to the lamented early lyrics, I do not suppose 
myself to be the person least tenderly reminiscent of 
them [I had grumbled at the excision of some admirable 
favourites] ; but it at any rate appears to be the 
commoner fault amongst verse-writers to write what is 
not worth writing, than to suppress what would merit 
hearers. I for my part am a great believer in the 



i6o Critical Kit-Kats 

genuine poetic impulse belonging (very often) to the 
spring and not to the autumn of life, and some estab- 
lished reputations fail to shake me in this opinion ; at 
any rate, if so one feels the possibility to stand in 
one's own case, then I vote that the grace of silence 
succeed the grace of song. By all which I do not 
bind myself to unbroken silence, but meanwhile I 
defend my position — or, you may retort, I do not 
defend it. By-the-by, your upness does not prevent my 
protesting that Edith and Maggie did not dream or even 
nap ; Flora did ; but have I not caught you napping ? 
Do, pray, come and see me and we will not fight." 

It is difficult to speak of either of the Rossetti ladies 
without a reference to the elder sister, whom also I had 
the privilege of knowing in early days. She left upon 
me the impression of stronger character, though of 
narrower intellect and infinitely poorer imagination. I 
formed the idea, I know not whether with justice, that 
the pronounced high-church views of Maria, who throve 
on ritual, starved the less pietistic, but painfully con- 
scientious nature of Christina. The influence of Maria 
Francesca Rossetti on her sister seemed to be like that 
of Newton upon Cowper, a species of police surveillance 
exercised by a hard, convinced mind over a softer and 
more fanciful one. Miss Maria Rossetti, who generally 
needed the name of Dante to awaken her from a certain 
social torpor, died in 1876, but not until she had set 
her seal on the religious habits of her sister. Such, 
at least, was the notion which I formed, perhaps on 
slight premises. 



Christina Rossetti l6i 

That the conscience of the younger sister was, in 
middle life, so tender as to appear almost morbid, no 
one, I think, will deny. I recall an amusing instance 
of it. In the winter of 1874, I was asked to secure 
some influential signatures to a petition against the 
destruction of a part of the New Forest. Mr. Swin- 
burne promised me his, if I could induce Miss Christina 
Rossetti to give hers, suggesting as he did so, that the 
feat might not be an easy one. In fact, I found that 
no little palaver was necessary ; but at last she was so 
far persuaded of the innocence of the protest that she 
wrote Chr; she then stopped, dropped the pen, and 
said very earnestly, " Are you sure that they do not 
propose to build churches on the land ? " After a 
long time, I succeeded in convincing her that such a 
scheme was not thought of, and she proceeded to 
write istina G. Ros, and stopped again. " Nor school- 
houses ? " fluctuating with tremulous scruple. At 
length she finished the signature, and I carried the 
parchment off to claim the fulfilment of Mr. Swin- 
burne's promise. And the labourer felt that he was 
worthy of his hire. 

On the 6th of July, 1876, I saw Christina Rossetti 
for the last time. I suppose that her life, during the 
last twenty years of it, was as sequestered as that of 
any pious woman in a religious house. She stirred 
but little, I fancy, from her rooms save to attend the 
services of the Anglican church. That her mind con- 
tinued humane and simple her successive publications 
and her kind and sometimes playful letters proved. 



1 62 Critical Kit-Kats 

Misfortunes attended her family, and she who had been 
the centre of so eager and vivid a group, Hved to find 
herself almost solitary. At length, on the 29th of 
December, 1894, after prolonged sufferings borne with 
infinite patience, this great writer, who was also a 
great saint, passed into the region of her visions. 



LORD DE TABLEY 



Lord De Tabley 

A PORTRAIT 

It will not be disputed, I think, by any one who en- 
joyed the friendship of the third Lord De Tabley 
that no more singular, more complicated, more pathetic 
nature has been — I dare not say revealed — but indi- 
cated to us in these late times. His mind was like a 
jewel with innumerable facets, all slightly blurred or 
misted ; or perhaps it would be a juster illustration to 
compare his character to an opal, where all the colours 
lie perdue, drowned in a milky mystery, and so arranged 
that to a couple of observers, simultaneously bending 
over it, the prevalent hue shall in one case seem a pale 
green, in the other a fiery crimson. This complication 
of Lord De Tabley's emotional experience, the ardour 
of his designs, the languor of his performance, the 
astonishing breadth and variety of his sympathies, his 
intense personal reserve, the feverish activity of his 
intellectual life, the universality of his knowledge, like 
that of a magician, the abysses of his ignorance, like 
those of a child, all these contrary elements fused in 
and veiled by a sort of radiant dimness, made his 
nature one of the most extraordinar}', because the 
most inscrutable, that I have ever known. Tennysoa 



1 66 Critical Kit-Kats 

said to me of Lord De Tabley, in 1888, "He is 
Faunus ; he is a woodland creature I " That was one 
aspect, noted with great acumen. But that was a 
single aspect. He was also a scholar of extreme 
elegance, a numismatist and a botanist of exact and 
minute accompHshment, the shyest of recluses, the most 
playful of companions, the most melancholy of solitaries, 
above all and most of all, yet in a curiously phantasmal 
way, a poet. It would need the hand of Balzac to 
draw together into a portrait threads so slight, so deli- 
cately elastic, and so intricately intertwined. When 
all should be said, however, in the most fastidious 
language, something would escape, and that would be 
the essential being of the strangest and the most 
shadowy of men. 



John Byrne Leicester Warren, the third and last 
Baron De Tabley, was born at Tabley House, Cheshire, 
on April 26, 1835. He was the eldest son, and his 
mother, Catherina Barbara, daughter of Jerome, Count 
De Salis, from whom he inherited his sensibility and 
his imagination, gave, I have heard, to the ceremony 
of his baptism something of a romantic character, his 
godfather, Lord Zouche, having brought water from 
the river Jordan for the christening. For the first 
twelve or thirteen years of his life, until he went to 
Eton, indeed, he lived mostly with his mother in the 
south of Europe, and faint impressions of this childish 



Lord De Tabley 167 

exile seemed to be always returning to him in later 
life. 

In these early days in Italy and Germany the 
foundation was laid of his love of botany, coins, 
minerals, and fine art, by the companionship of his 
godfather, then Robert Curzon, who travelled with 
his parents, and who bought for them the beautiful 
Italian things — enamels, majolica, medals, and statuettes 
— which are now the ornament of Tabley House. He 
was a finished connoisseur, and in his company the 
little Johnny visited old shops and museums, eager to 
begin, at ten years of age, a collection of his own. He 
was meanwhile being very carefully prepared for Eton. 

In 1845 the death of his younger brother made 
centre about John Warren the hopes of the family, 
and no more male children were born to his father. 
From Eton he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford. 
Among his close Oxford friends, there survive Sir 
Henry Longley, who is now his executor, and Sir 
Baldwyn Leigh ton, who, in 1864, become his brother- 
in-law. Henry Cowper, Lord Edward Clinton, and 
the late Lord Lothian were among his close companions. 
Prince Frederick of Holstein, who died some ten years 
ago, was a very great friend up to the last. But by 
far the dearest of his college intimates was George 
Fortescue, a young man of extraordinary promise, a 
few weeks older than himself, who awakened in Warren 
the passion for poetry, and was all to him that Arthur 
Hallam was to Tennyson. Fortescue would, perhaps, 
have been a poet had he lived ; at all events, the two 



1 68 Critical Kit-Kats 

friends wrote verses in secret, and, as shall presently 
be told, in secret published them. This delightful 
association, however, was suddenly snapped; on 
November 2, 1859, George Fortescue lost his footing 
while climbing a mast on board the yacht of the late 
Earl of Drogheda in the Mediterranean, fell, and was 
killed. This incident was one from which John 
Warren never entirely recovered ; after the first agony 
of grief he mentioned his friend no more, and would 
fain have obliterated his very memory. 

Before this deplorable catastrophe, however, Warren 
had entered life. He had taken his degree in 1856, with 
a double second-class in classics and modern history. 
In the autumn of 1858 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 
going out to Turkey for the last time, to bid farewell to 
the Sultan, was permitted to take with him three unpaid 
temporary attaches. He chose John Warren, Lord 
Sandwich (then Lord Hinchinbrooke), and Mr. J. R. 
Swinton, the portrait-painter. The visit to Constan- 
tinople was, on the whole, fairly agreeable. Warren 
made the acquaintance of Lord Strangford, with whom 
he found himself infinitely in sympathy, and whose 
close friend he remained until Lord Strangford's un- 
timely death. He went reluctantly, but Lord Strang- 
ford's companionship was a joy to him, and as numis- 
matics were now the passion of his life, he was able to 
dig in the Troad for the coins of Asia Minor, and to scour 
the bazaars of Stamboul for Greek federal moneys. The 
months spent in Turkey were not without stimulus and 
interest ; unhappily he suffered from dysentery and had 



Lord De Tabley 1 69 

to come home. This disease he never entirely con- 
quered ; only the other day he wrote from Ryde, ** I am 
just as bad as I was with the Cannings at Constan- 
tinople." 

After his return to England, the shock of Fortescue's 
death at first unfitted him for all mental exertion. But 
he struggled against his unhappiness, continued his 
numismatic studies, seriously determined to become a 
poet, and began to see a little more of that Cheshire life, 
in his father's noble old house, which hitherto he had 
known so little. His talents attracted the attention of 
family friends and neighbours, such as Mr. Gladstone 
and Lord Houghton, with both of whom, but especially 
with the former, he became on intimate terms. He was 
called to the Bar in i860. The Cheshire Yeomanry 
had its headquarters in Tabley Park, and John Warren 
was first an officer in, and then captain of it, until he 
came into the title in 1887, when, to the regret of the 
neighbourhood, he gave up this local interest. All these 
things will sound strange to those who only knew Lord 
De Tabley as a poet ; still stranger to those who knew 
him as a man may sound the fact that in 1868, urged by 
his father, and under the particular aegis of Mr. Glad- 
stone, he unsuccessfully contested Mid-Cheshire in the 
Liberal interest. What is less known is that, a little 
while before Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill, 
Warren had determined to try for a seat again ; but 
events presently converted him into a Liberal Unionist. 
At his father's second marriage in 1 871, he left his 
home in Cheshire, and went to reside in London. 



170 Critical Kit-Kats 

In the' later sixties, when he was more and more 
devoting himself to poetry and science, he was less of 
of a recluse than at any other period of his life. After 
the publication of his Philoctetes in 1867, the late Lord 
Houghton introduced him to Tennyson, who was always 
a warm admirer of his poetry. Warren's acquaintance 
with Tennyson became almost intimate for seven or 
eight years, although he could not quite get over a certain 
terror of that formidable bard. (After 1880, I think, 
he never saw him.) Several incidents, among which I 
will only mention the death of his mother in February, 
1869^ and of his sister, Lady Bathurst, in 1872, tended 
to deepen and irritate his melancholy, which had already 
become chronic when I first knew him in 1875. Suc- 
cessive annoyances and disappointments so fostered 
this condition, that about 1880 he practically disappeared. 
That was the beginning of the time to which Sir Mount- 
stuart Grant Duff refers, in the valuable and interesting 
notice of De Tabley which he contributed to the Spec- 
tator of December 7, 1895, when he says that people 
declared " Warren has two intimate friends. The first 
he has riot seen for five years, the second for six." 

The death of his father, in 1887, roused him from 
his social lethargy. He found the estate practically in- 
solvent, and only by the sacrifice of the whole of his 
own private fortune, and the greatest economy during 
the remainder of his life, was he able to prevent the 
sale and secure the retention of the family mansion. In 
1893 the success of his Poems gave him an instant of 
fame, which greatly comforted and cheered him. That 



Lord De Tabley 171 

year was probably, on the whole, the brightest of his 
life. But he was already looking old, and those who 
have seen him ever since at short intervals must have 
noticed how rapidly he was ageing and weakening. 
When, this last summer, he lunched with me to meet 
Mr. Bailey, the author of Festus^ a man more than twenty 
years his senior, I could but wonder whether any 
stranger could have conceived Lord De Tabley to be the 
younger. All this autumn his face had the solemn Tro- 
phonian pallor, the look of the man who has seen Death 
in the cave. Yet the end was unexpected. He was 
planning to spend the winter at Bournemouth with his 
sister, Lady Leighton, but lingered on, as his wont was, 
in his lodgings at Ryde. He was positively ill but a 
day or two, sinking rapidly, and passing away, without 
suffering, on November 22, 1895, in his sixty-first year. 
The coffin was brought to his beautiful home in Cheshire, 
and buried in the grass of Little Peover churchyard, 
where he had wished to lie. Earth from the Holy Land 
was sprinkled over him, and the grave was filled up with 
clods from a certain covert where he had loved to 
botanise. Such is the meagre outline of a life, whose 
adventures were almost wholly those of the soul. 



John Warren's first enterprise in the world of pub- 
lished poetry was a very obscure little volume, issued in 
1859, under the title of Poems. By G. F. Preston. 
This was the conjoint pseudonym of two Oxford friends, 



172 Critical Kit-Kats 

of whom George Fortescue was the other. A rarer 
volume scarcely exists, for nobody bought it, and almost 
every copy disappeared, or was destroyed. It is a mere 
curiosity, for it contains not a single piece that deserves 
to live, although it is interesting to find in it several 
subjects and titles which Warren afterwards used again. 
Immense is the advance, in every direction, marked by 
Praeterita^ a volume entirely by Warren, published in 
1863, under another pseudonym, " William Lancaster." 
The moment was not favourable to the issue of poetry 
of a contemplative and descriptive order. Mrs. Brown- 
ing and Clough were lately dead ; Tennyson, while 
preparing the Enoch Arden volume, had published 
nothing since The Idylls of the King; Matthew Arnold, 
who appeared to have given up the practice of poetry, 
in which no one encouraged him, was a professor at 
Oxford ; Robert Browning had been silent since the cold 
reception of Men and Women. It was a dead time, 
before the revival and wild revels of the Preraphael- 
ites. No verse that was not smoothly Tennysonian 
and mildly idyllic was in favour with the public. 

Warren's modest volume had no success, nor is it 
probable that it has ever possessed more than a very 
few readers. Yet its merits should have been patent 
to at least one reviewer. The splendour of diction 
which was afterwards to distinguish his poetry Warren 
had not yet discovered. Praeterita is noticeable mainly 
for two qualities — for the close and individual observa- 
tion of natural phenomena, in which not even Tenny- 
son excelled Lord De Tabley, and for the technical 



Lord De Tabley 173 

beauty of the blank verse pieces, which are usually 
better made than the lyrical. Of the former of those 
qualities specimens may be given almost at random, as 
this of a frosty day in the country : 

When the waves are solid foor. 

And the clods are iron-bound. 
And the boughs are crystalFd hoar. 

And the red leaf nailed aground ; 

When the fieldfare^ s flight is slozu^ 

And a rosy vapour-rim, 
Now the sun is small and low^ 

Belts along the region dim ; 

When the ice-crack flies and flaws. 
Shore to shore, with thunder shocky 

Deeper than the evening daws. 
Clearer than the village clock. 

(De Tabley was, like Wordsworth, a bold and graceful 
skater, and used, it is said, to cut his own name in full 
on the ice of Tabley Lake without pausing) ; or this 
description of dawn : 

ere heaven's stubborn bar and subtle screen 
Crumbled in purple chains of sailing shower 
And bared the captive morning in his cell i 

while his mosaic of delicate and minute observation of 
aerial phenomena is displayed in conjunction with the 
excellence of his blank verse in this study of ** tremulous 
evening " : 



174 Critical Kit-Kats 

The weeds of night coast round her lucid edge^ 

Yoked under bulks of tributary cloud ; 

The leaves are shaken on the forest flowers^ 

And silent as the silence of a shrine 

Lies a great power of sunset on the groves. 

Greyly the fingered shadows dwell between 

The reaching chestnut-branches. Grey the mask 

Of twilight, and the bleak unmellow speed 

Of blindness on the visage of fresh hills. 

Here every epithet is felt, is observed ; and the 
volume is full of such pictures and of such verse. 
Nevertheless, the book is not interesting ; its beauties 
are easily overlooked, and we feel, in glancing back, 
that it gave an inadequate impression of its author's 
powers. Similar characteristics marked the volumes 
called Eclogues and Monodramas and Studies in Verse. 

Then came the publication of Atalanta in Calydon^ 
and Warren's eyes were dazzled with the emergence of 
this blazing luminary from the Oxford horizon, which 
he had himself so lately left. 

Of Mr. Swinburne's influence on Warren's imagina- 
tion, on his whole intellectual character, there can be 
no question. Personal influence there was none ; he 
recollected, dimly, the brilliant boy at Eton, two years 
his junior ; and once, in 1877, I persuaded these two 
men, of talents and habits of mind so diverse, to meet 
at dinner in my house ; with that exception — and 
Warren, was absolutely tongue-tied throughout the 
eventful evening — he never (I think) saw the poet 
whose work had so deeply ploughed up his prejudices 



Lord De Tabley 175 



and traditions. But he had been one of tlic very first 
to read /Ualaiita, and he had tormented G. H. Lewes 
into a grudging permission to let him write about it in 
ihc Fortnighlly Review. His article appeared, and was 
one of those which earliest called attention to Mr. 
Swinburne's genius ; but Lewes, although Warren's 
criticism was signed, had toned down the ardour of it, 
and had introduced one or two slighting phrases. 
These editorial corrections poor Warren carried about 
with him, like open wounds, for, it is no exaggeration 
to say, thirty years, and to the last could never be 
reminded of Mr. Swinburne without a shudder at the 
thought of what he must think that Warren thought he 
thought. Alas ! at times his life was made a perfect 
nightmare to him by reverberated sensibilities of this 
kind. 

The importance of the stimulus given to Warren by 
Mr. Swinburne's early publications was seen in the 
metrical drama after the antique, Philoctdcs, printed in 
1867. It was announced as *'byM.A.," which meant 
Master of Arts, a further excess of anonymity, but 
which was interpreted as meaning Matthew Arnold, to 
the author's unfeigned dismay. This rumour — instantly 
contradicted, of course — gave a certain piquancy to the 
book, and this was the one of all Warren's early 
volumes which may be said to have received an 
adequate welcome. It was compared virith Merope, and 
its superiority to that frigid fiasco was patent. In 
Philocktcs Warren, undisturbed by the circumstance 
that Sophocles had taken the same story for one of the 



176 Critical Kit-Kats 

most stately of his tragedies, undertook to develop the 
character of the wounded exile in his solitary cave in 
Lemnos, and under the wiles of Ulysses. In the poem 
of Sophocles no woman is introduced, but Warren 
creates ^gle, a girl of the island, humbly devoted to 
Philoctetes. Instead of the beautiful, delicate Neopto- 
lemus of Sophocles, the modern poet makes the com- 
panion of Ulysses a rougher figure, and omits Heracles 
altogether. This plot, indeed, is quite independent of 
that of Sophocles. He introduces a chorus of fisher- 
men, who chant unrhymed odes, often of extreme beauty, 
in this manner : 

Pan is a god seated in nature^ s cave, 

Abiding with us^ 

No cloudy ruler in the delicate air-belts^ 

But in the ripening slips and tangles 

Of cork-woods^ in the bull-rush pits where oxea 

Lie soaking, chin-deep ; 

In the mulberry-orchard. 

With milky kexes and marrowy hemlocks, 

Among the floating silken under-darnels. 

He is a god, this Pan, 

Content to dwell among us, nor disdains 

The damp, hot wood-smell s 

He loves the flakes pine-boles sand-brown. 

To give any impression of a tragical drama by brief 
extracts is impossible. But Warren put a great deal 
of himself into the soliloquies of the lame warrior, and 
few who knew him but will recognise a self-conscious 
portrait when Ulysses tells his companion that 



Lord De Tabley 177 

Persuasion^ Pyrrhus, is a delicate things 
And very intricate the toil ofzvords 
Whereby to smoothe away the spiteful past 
From a proud heart on edge with long disease ; 
For round the sick man, like a poison d mist. 
His wrongs are ever brooding. He cannot shake 
Ihese insects of the shadow from his brow 
In the free bountiful air of enterprize. 
Therefore expect reproaches of this man 
And bitter spurts oj anger ; for much pain 
Hath nothing healed his wound these many years. 

The publication of Philodetes, however, marks a 
period of healing almost like that of the Lemnian hero's 
own return. The shy and self-distrusting poet was 
conscious of a warm tide of encouragement. From 
many sides greetings flowed in upon him. Tennyson, 
though deprecating the composition of antique choral 
dramas as not a natural form of art, applauded ; Robert 
Browning was enthusiastic ; Mr. Gladstone, an old 
family friend, was warm in congratulation. This was 
the one bright moment in Warren's early literary life ; 
something like fame seemed to reach him for a moment, 
and his delicate, shy nature expanded in the glow of it. 
It passed as quickly as it came, and a quarter of a 
century was to go by, and nearly the whole remaining 
period of his life, before he tasted popular praise again. 

Encouraged by this ephemeral success and applause, 
and under the stress of a violent and complicated 
private emotion, Warren wrote in 1868 another antique 
drama, his Orestes, in my judgment the most completely 

M 



178 Critical Kit-Kats 

satisfactory of his works, and the most original. It 
was not, however, well received. The classical re- 
viewers were stupefied to discover that the hero was 
not the celebrated son of Agamemnon, but a wholly 
fictitious Orestes, " prince of the Larissaean branch of 
the Aleuadae." This fact alienated sympathy while it 
puzzled the critics, who received with frigid caution a 
play, the plot of which seemed to lay a trap for their 
feet. Why Warren, with characteristic lack of literary 
tact, chose the unhappy name of Orestes for his hero, 
I know not ; when it was too late, he bewailed his 
imprudence. But the reception of this noble poem — 
which, some day or other, must be re-discovered and 
read — was one of the tragical events in Warren's life. 
This should, too, have been the moment for him to 
drop the veil, and come forward in his real person ; but 
all he could persuade himself to concede was a return 
to the old unmeaning pseudonymn, ** William Lan- 
caster." 

The neglect was trebly undeserved. Orestes was 
one of the most beautiful poems that English literature 
produced between the generation of Arnold and that of 
Rossetti. The plot is simple, dignified, and dramatic, 
the verse strong and vivid, well-knit, and not of a too- 
waxy sweetness. There is a scene near the close — 
where Orestes, who has discovered that his mother, 
Dyseris, is dishonoured in the love of Simus, an 
adventurer, turns upon her, breaking the chain of filial 
awe, and denounces her crimes to her face, going too 
far, indeed, and accusmg her, talseiy, ol a design upon 



Lord De Tabley 179 

his own life — which is magnificent, with the stately, 
large passion of Racine. It is unfortunate that to 
quote intelligibly any of this species of poetry demands 
a wider space than can here be spared. But I hope 
that whatever revival of Lord De Tabley's poetry may 
be made, will without fail include Orestes. 

In the next years he essayed, still as William Lan- 
caster, to write novels. He made no mark, though, I 
believe, a little money, by A Screw Loose, 1868, and 
Ropes of Sand ^ 1869. He returned to his true vocation 
in the volume of poems entitled Rehearsals^ 1870, when 
for the first time a title-page carried the full name John 
Leicester Warren. Searching the Net followed in 1873, 
and we may take these two books together, for they 
were identical in character, and they displayed the poet 
at his average level of execution. In these dramatic 
monologues, songs, odes, and sonnets we find a talent, 
which in its essence was exquisite, struggling against 
a variety of disadvantages. Among these — and it is 
necessary to mention them, for they were always Lord 
De Tabley's persistent enemies — two w^ere peculiarly 
prominent, want of concentration and want of critical 
taste. The importance of the first-mentioned quality, 
in his case, was exemplified by the success of the 
volume of 1893, which mainly consisted of the best 
things, and nothing but the best, which he had previ- 
ously published. The second led him to produce and 
to print w^hat was not reprinted in 1893, and to give it 
just as much prominence as he gave his best pieces. 
Nothing else will account for the neglect of such things 



i8o Critical Kit-Kats 

as lie strewn about the pages of these unequal volumes, 
pictures like : 

Where deep woods swoon with solitude divine^ 
I wait thee there, arm-deep injlowery twine. 
Where gleam Jiushed poppies in among grey tares ; 
Grape-clusters mellow near, and tumbled pears 
Are brown in orchard-grass. The fern-owl calls 
At eve across the cloven river-falls. 
Whose flood leaves here an island, there a swan. 

Or this, from the fine dramatic fragment called 
"Medea": 

The sullen king turns roughly on his heel, 
W^hirling his regal mantle round his eyes, 
And so departs, with slow steps, obstinate; 
Ah, but the queen, the pale one, beautiful. 
Prone, in the dust her holy bosom laid. 
Mingles her outspread hair with fallen leaves^ 
And sandal-soil is on her gracious head. 
Ah, lamentable lady ^ pit ful f 

Warren's next work was a drama, on which he was 
working long, and from which he expected much. But 
The Soldier of Fortune^ 1876, proved the worst of his 
literary disasters. It was a vague German story of the 
sixteenth century put into blank verse, and cut into 
five huge acts ; this " play " extends to between four 
and five hundred pages. It is essentially undramatic, 
mere bed-rock, through which run veins of pure gold of 
poetry, but in an impregnable condition. The Soldier 



Lord Dc Tablcy i8i 

of Fortune is full of beautiful lines, one of which, in 

particular, has always run in my memory — 

On worm-drilPd vellums of Id-time revenges^ — 

but it is perfectly hopeless as a piece of literature. He 
told me lately — I know not whether in pardonable 
exaggeration — that not a single copy of it was sold. 
He was deeply irritated and wounded, and now began 
that retirement from the public which lasted obstinately 
for seventeen years. 

At last his brother-in-law. Sir Baldwyn Leighton, 
persuaded him that a new generation had arisen, to 
whom he might make a fresh appeal. Others encour- 
aged this idea, and by degrees the notion that a selection 
of the best things in his old books, supplemented by 
what he had written during these years of eclipse, 
might form a volume which people would read with 
pleasure. The result was Poems Dramatic and Lyrical^ 
of 1893, which still represents Lord De Tabley to the 
majority of readers. This book enjoyed a genuine and 
substantial success, quite as great as verse of this 
stately order could enjoy. He was encouraged to write 
more, and, to our general astonishment, he was able, 
in the spring of 1895, to produce, in identical form, a 
second series of the Poems. This was respectfully 
received, but so enthusiastic a welcome as greeted 
the concentrated selection of 1893 was hardly to be 
looked for. 

From the new poems in the volume of 1893 a frag- 
ment of that entitled " Circe " may here be quoted : 



i8z Critical Kit-Kats 

Reared across a loom. 
Hung a fair web of tapestry half done. 
Crowding with folds and fancies half the room: 
Men eyed as gods, and damsels still as stone 
Pressing their brows alone. 
In amethystine robes, 

Or reaching at the polished orchard-globes. 
Or rubbing parted love-lips on their rind. 
While the wind 

Sows with sere apple-leaves their breast and hair s 
And all the margin there 
Was arabesqued and bordered intricate 
With hairy spider-things 
That catch and clamber. 
And -salamander in his dripping-cave, 
Satanic ebon-amber ; 

Blind-worm, and asp, and eft of cumbrous gait. 
And toads who love rank grasses near a grave. 
And the great goblin moth, who bears 
Between his wings the ruined eyes of death; 
And the enamelled sails 

Of butterflies who watch the morning^ s breath. 
And many an emerald lizard with quick ears. 
Asleep in rocky dales ; 
And for an outer fringe embroidered sm.all, 
A ring of many locusts, horny-coated, 
A round of chirping tree-frogs merry-throated. 
And sly, fat fishes sailing, watching all. 

This sumptuous picture, a sort of Shield of Achilles in 
a fragment of an epic, is very strongly composed. 

If we examine the central and typical qualities oi 



Lord De Tablcy 1 83 

Lord Dc Tablcy as a poet, we are struck first by the 
brocaded magnificence of his style. This steadily grew 
with his growth, and was an element of real originality. 
It is to be distinguished from anything like tinsel or 
flash in what he wrote; it was a genuine thing, fostered, 
in later years, by a very close study of the diction of 
Milton, which gave him more and more delight as he 
grew older. He liked to wrap his thought in cloth of 
gold, to select from the immense repertory of his 
memory the most gorgeously sonorous noun, the most 
imperial adjective, at his command. In all this he was 
consciously out of sympathy with the men of our own 
time, who prefer the rougher, directcr verbiage, or else 
a studied simplicity. The poetry of Lord De Tabley 
was not simple ; when he tried to make it homely, he 
utterly failed. His efforts at humour, at naive pathos, 
were generally unfortunate. But, when his melan- 
choly, dignified Muse stalked across the stage wrapped 
in heavy robes, stifif with threads of gold, she rose to 
her full stature and asserted her personal dignity with 
success. It was with the gorgeous writers of the 
middle of the seventeenth century that Lord De Tabley 
found himself in fullest sympathy, with Milton and 
Crashaw in verse, with Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas 
Browne in prose. So, among poets of the present 
century, his sympathies were all with Keats and 
Browning, while for Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold 
he had a positive indifference ; he liked a weighty form 
and full colour in style, and it was in the production of 
such a manner that he excelled. 



184 Critical Kit-Kats 

Another central quality which distinguishes him as a 
poet is his extremely minute and accurate observation 
of natural phenomena. Many poets of a high order 
recognise no flower but the rose, and no bird but the 
nightingale, and are fortunate if the whale is not their 
only fish. But among his exceptional accomplishments, 
Lord De Tabley counted an exact knowledge of several 
branches of science. In botany, in particular, and in 
ornithology, his reputation at certain points was Euro- 
pean ; I believe I am right, for instance, in saying that 
he was the first living authority on the Brambles. His 
eye, trained in many branches of observation, served 
him admirably as a poet ; for the general reader, it 
served him, perhaps, too well, bewildering the untaught 
brain with the frequency and the exactitude of his 
images drawn from the visible world of earth and sky. 
In these he is not less accurate than Tennyson, and 
he sometimes pushes his note of nature still further 
into elaborate portraitures of country life than Tenny- 
son, with greater tact, ever cared to do. 

If I am asked to say, at once, wherein I consider 
that the strength and weakness alike of this poet con- 
sisted, I reply in his treatment of detail. His theory 
of execution was one in which detail took a paramount 
place. Jewels five words long were what he delighted 
in and desired to produce, and to secure them he sacri- 
ficed the general rotundity and perfection of his work. 
In this, as in certain other points, he resembled the 
great Jacobean poets. Like Cyril Tourneur, or like 
Giles Fletcher, to mention two very dissimilar writers, 



Lord De Tabley 185 

with each of whom he presented certain analogies, he 
was so fascinated with a single line that was 
specially exquisite or thrilling, a single image which 
was novel and picturesque, that he was content to 
leave it set in a ragged passage which was almost 
wholly without charm. He even seemed, as they often 
seem, to prefer to wear his rubies and opals on a dingy 
texture that they might beam from it more radiantly. 
The splendid single line is out of fashion now — fifty 
years ago it was absolutely dominant in English poetry 
— and Lord De Tabley's resolute cultivation of it gave 
his verse an old-fashioned air. We are just now all in 
favour of a poetry in which the force and beauty are 
equally distributed throughout, and in which execution, 
not of a line or of a stanza, but of a complete poem, is 
aimed at. But this is really a fashion rather than 
a law. 

m 

In some dedicatory verses to myself, which Lord 
De Tabley printed in 1893, he said that " twtnty years 
and more" were then " ended" since the beginning of 
our friendship. His memory slightly stretched the 
period, but it was in the winter of 1875 that I met 
him first. I have no recollection of the event ; one 
week I had never heard of him, the next week he had 
become part of my existence. Long afterwards he 
told me that, crossing Hyde Park one Sunday morn- 
ing, after a painful interview with an old companion, 
he had observed to himself that his acquaintances had 



1 86 Critical Kit-Kats 

fallen below the number which he could count on the 
fingers of his two hands ; his principle was that one 
should not be acquainted with fewer than ten people in 
all, and so he determined to know Mr. Austin Dobson and 
myself, ** to add a little new blood," as he put it. For 
my part, I was too raw and inexperienced to appreciate 
the distinction of his choice, but not too dull to value 
the soft goings and comings of this moth-like man, so 
hushed and faded, like a delicate withered leaf, so 
mysterious, so profoundly learned, so acutely sensitive 
that an inflection in the voice seemed to chill him like 
a cold wind, so refined that with an ardent thought the 
complexion of his intellect seemed to flush like the 
cheek of a girl. 

He was forty at that time, but looked older. Those 
who have seen him in these last years recall a finer 
presence, a more " striking " personality. Of late he 
carried upon his bending shoulders a veritable tete de 
rot en exil; he reminded us, towards the end, of one 
of the fallen brethren of Hyperion. But in 1875, in 
his unobtmsive dress, with his timid, fluttering manner, 
there was nothing at all impressive in the outer guise 
of him. He seemed to melt into the twilight of a 
corner, to succeed, as far as a mortal can, in being 
invisible. This evasive ghost, in a loose snuff-coloured 
coat, would always be the first person in the room to 
be overlooked by a superficial observer. It was in a 
Ute-d-Ute across the corner of the mahogany, under a 
lamplight that emphasised the noble modelling of the 
forehead, and lighted up the pale azure eyes, that a 



Lord De Tahley 187 

companion saw what manner of man he was dealing 
with, and half-divined, perhaps, the beauty and wisdom 
of this unique and astonishing mind. It was an 
education to be permitted to listen to him then, to 
receive his slight and intermittent confidences, to pour 
out, with the inconsiderate egotism of youth, one's own 
hopes and failures, to feel this infinitely refined and 
sensitive spirit benignantly concentrated on one's 
prentice efforts, which seemed to grow a little riper 
and more dignified by the mere benediction of that 
smile. His intellect, in my opinion, was a singularly 
healthy one, and, therefore, in its almost preternatural 
quickness and many-sidedness, calculated to help and 
stimulate the minds of others. It did not guide or 
command, it simply radiated light around the steps of 
a friend. The radiance was sometimes faint, but it 
was exquisite, and it seemed omnipresent. 

Yet it is unquestionable that to most of those who 
saw Lord De Tabley casually, his manner gave the 
impression more of hypochondria than of health. 
That excessive sensitiveness of his, which shrank 
from the slightest impact of what was, or what even 
faintly seemed to be, unsympathetic, could but produce 
on the superficial observer an idea of want of self- 
command. To pretend that the equilibrium of his 
spirit was not disturbed would be idle ; the turmoil 
of his nerves was written on those fierce and timid 
eyes of his. But it is only right now to say, and to 
say with insistence, that it was no indulgence of eccen- 
tricity, no wilful melancholy, that made him so quiver- 



1 88 Critical Kit-Kats 

ing and shrinking a soul. He had suffered from 
troubles such as now may well be buried in his grave, 
sorrows that beset him from his youth up, disappoint- 
ments and disillusions that dogged him to the very close 
of his career, and made death itself almost welcome 
to him, although he loved life so well. He was one 
who, like Gray, "never spoke out," and only those 
who knew him best could divine what the foxes were 
that gnawed the breast under the cloak. Very few 
human beings are pursued from the beginning of life 
to its close with so many distracting griefs and per- 
plexities, such a combination of misfortunes and wear- 
ing annoyances, as this gentle-hearted poet, who grew, 
at last, so harried by the implacable ingenuity of his 
destiny that a movement or a word would awaken his 
fatalistic alarm. 

The knowledge of this should now accojint for a 
good deal that puzzled and even grieved his friends. 
Moral and physical suffering had rendered the epidermis 
of his character so excessively thin that the merest 
trifle pained him ; he was like those unfortunate persons 
who are born without a scarf-skin, on whom the pres- 
sure of a twig or the grip of a hand brings blood. 
This sensitiveness was pitiable, and the results of it 
even a little blameworthy, since, if they entailed 
wretchedness on himself, they caused needless pain to 
those who truly loved him. I doubt if any friend, 
however tactful in self-abnegation, got through many 
years of Lord De Tabley's intimacy without an electric 
storm. His imagination aided his ingenuity in self- 



Lord De Tabley 189 

torture, and conjured up monsters of malignity, spectres 
that strode across the path of friendship and rendered 
it impassable. But his tempestuous heat was not 
greater than his placability, and those who had not 
patience to wait the return of his kinder feelings can 
scarcely have been worthy of them. 

He lived for friendship — poetry and his friends were 
the two lode-stars of his life. Yet he cultivated his 
intimates oddly. He sometimes reminded me of a bird- 
fancier with all his pets in separate cages ; he attended 
to each of them in turn, but he did not choose that they 
should mix in a general social aviary. He was not un- 
willing to meet the acquaintances of his friends, but he 
did not care to bring his intimates much into contact 
with one another. Probably the number of these last 
was greater than any one of them was accustomed to 
realise. At the head of them all, I think, stood Sir 
Mountstuart Grant Duff; not far behind. Sir A. W. 
Franks. Besides these companions of his youth, he 
cultivated among the friends of his middle life. Sir Henry 
Howorth, Mr. W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, and others, each 
linked with him by a combination of tastes — anti- 
quarianism, numismatics, zoology, horticulture, some 
pursuit which made the woof of a texture in which 
personal sympathy was the warp. But he lived among 
the dead, and to these his attitude was much the same 
as that of a priest in the shrine of his vanished deities. 
To him the unseen faces were often more real than the 
living ones. 

The side on which I was most capable ot appreciating 



190 Critical Kit-Kats 

Lord de Tabley's gifts as a collector was the biblio- 
graphical. If I am anything of a connoisseur in this 
direction, I owe it to his training. His zeal in the 
amassing of early editions of the English poets was 
extreme ; he was one of those who think nothing of 
hanging about a book-shop at six in the morning, waiting 
for the shutters to be taken down. But his zeal was 
eminently according to knowledge. He valued his first 
edition for the text's sake, not for the bare fact of rarity. 
Every book he bought he read, and with a critical gusto. 
A little anecdote may illustrate his spirit as a collector. 
In 1877 he secured, by a happy accident, a copy of 
Milton's Poems of 1645, a book which he had never met 
with before. Too eager to wait for the post, he sent a 
messenger round to my house with a note to announce 
not merely the joyful fact, but — this is the interesting 
point — a discovery he had made in the volume, namely, 
that the line in the '* Nativity Ode," which in all later 
editions has run, 

OrFd in a rainbow, and like glories wearing, 

originally stood, 

Ihe enamelPa arras of the rainbow wearing, 

" which," as he said, " is a grand mouthful of sound, 
and ever so much better than the weak Mike glories.' " 
I shall not forget, when dining alone with him once 
at Onslow Square, noticing that at the beginning of the 
meal he was strangely distraught. At length, the post 
came, and Warren (as he then was) tore open one 



Lord De Tabley 191 



envelope wildly; he read the first words, and sank back 
faint in his chair, hiding his eyes with his hands. I was 
convinced that some terrible calamity had happened to 
him, but it was only that he had secured a first edition of 
Shelley's Alastor at a country auction, and — la joie 
fatsait pcurl For some of his little, rare seventeenth- 
century volumes, he had an almost petulant affection. 
He has celebrated in beautiful verse his copy of Suck- 
ling's Fragmenta Aurca ; and perhaps I may be allowed 
to tell one more bibliomaniac story. On a certain occa- 
sion when I was at his house, Robert Browning and 
Frederick Locker being the other guests, Warren had 
put on the table his latest prize, a copy of Sir William 
Davenant's Madagascar of 1638. Browning presently 
got hold of the little book, and began reading passages 
aloud, making fun of the poetry (which, indeed, is pretty 
bad) with " Listen, now, to this," and " Here's a fine 
conceit." Warren bore it for a little while, and then he 
very gently took the volume out of Browning's hands, 
and hid it away. " Oh ! " he explained to me after- 
wards, ** I could not allow him to patronise Davenant." 

A particular favourite with him was Quarles, as com- 
bining the metaphysical poet with the emblematist. He 
had a curious theory that the influence, not only of 
Quarles, but of Alciati, could be traced in the designs 
of Blake, another special object of his study. Before 
I leave bibliography I am tempted to quote a passage 
from one of De Tabley's delightful letters, now nearly 
twenty years old : 

" I have been cheered up by bujang to-day a copy of 



192 Critical Kit-Kats 

Henry Lawes' Ayres for the Theorbo; or^ Bas Viol, 
1653, with some Herrick and Lovelace pieces set. Also 
a Spenser of 16 10, the first collected Folio, with nice 
little plates to the Shepherd's Calendar — one each month. 
I must tell you, for very idiocy — I had the most vivid 
dream last night that you and I were cardinals, turning 
over books in the Vatican Library. I remember the 
look of my own red stockings. We were both in car- 
dinal red from top to toe. I felt quite pleased to be so 
smart, but your robes seemed better made. How infi- 
nitely absurd ! But so vivid. A certain room I re- 
membered in the Vatican came back fresh, and the exact 
dress of the old creatures I saw at the Council (in 
1869)." 

Bibliography and the ardour of the collector led 
Warren by degrees into a department where he was 
destined to exercise a considerable influence. His love 
of books extended to a study of those marks of owner- 
ship which are known as ex-libris, and in 1880 he pub- 
lished A Guide to the Study of Book-plates, a handsomely 
illustrated volume which has been the pioneer of many 
interesting works, and of a whole society of students 
and annotators. He was led to the historical study of 
the book-plate by his love of heraldry, which was to 
be traced, too, in more than one passage of his poetry. 
I cannot recollect that his enthusiasm for books extended 
to bindings. His own library, of which it was his inten- 
tion to prepare a privately printed catalogue — a project 
which his premature death has frustrated — was not 
conspicuous bibliopegically. He belonged to the class of 



Lord De Tahlcy 193 

bibliophiles whose books lie strewn over sofas and arm- 
chairs, instead of being ranged in cases like jewels. Hi3 
servant, I recollect his telling me, became so incensed 
with his books that he grew to regard them as personal 
enemies, and when, about 1879, Warren proposed to 
move from Onslow Square, this man snorted with the 
joy of battle, and said, "At last I'll be even with them 
dummed books." 

He was writing poetry to the last, and I think, from 
what he very lately wrote to me, that a volume of MS. 
verses will be found almost ready for the press. It 
was a great pleasure to him to know that many of his 
fellow-craftsmen were now eager to receive his work. 
Mr. Austin Dobson had always been an admirer, and 
one of the latest tributes which cheered De Tabley 
was a copy of verses from this friend of twenty years, 
which I have the privilege of printing here for the first 
time : 

Still may the Muses foster thee^ Friend, 

JVh, while the vacant quidnuncs stand at gaze. 
Wondering what Prophet next the Fates will send^ 

Still tread' St the ancient ways ; 
Still climb'' St the clear-cold altitudes of Song, 

Or, lingering " by the shore of old Romance,^ 
Heed' St not the vogue, how little or how long. 

Of marvels made in France. 
Still to the summits may thy face be set ; 

And long may we, that heard thy motning rhymi^ 
Hang on thy mid- day music, nor forget 
In the hushed even-time / 



194 Critical Kit-Kats 

Mr. Theodore Watts, too — v/hose touching and pic- 
turesque anecdotes in the Aihenceum of November 30 
are of real value in forming an impression of Lord 
De Tabley's character — was a constant and judicious 
encourager of his art. 

In those three latest years of his partial reappearance 
in the world of letters, Lord De Tabley has rejoiced 
many of his old friends by a renewal of the early 
delightful relations. He has formed new friendships, 
too, among those who will remember his noble head 
and gentle, stately manners when we older ones have 
joined him. He appreciated the company of several 
members of the new school of poets, and especially 
that of Mr. William Watson, Mr. John Davidson, and 
Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson. The last named, I 
think, in particular, enjoyed a greater intimacy with 
him than any other man who is now less than thirty- 
five years of age. There has been so much of the 
elder generation, then, in this little memoir, that I 
prefer to close with a few words written to me by this 
latest friend when the death was announced — words 
which Mr. Benson kindly permits me to print : 

** Lord de Tabley always struck me as being a 
curious instance of the irony of destiny — a man with 
so many sources of pleasure and influence open to him 
— his love of literature, his mastery of style, his 
conversational charm, his social position, his affectionate 
nature — yet bearing always about with him a curious 
attitude of resignation and disappointment, as though 
life were, on the whole, a sad business, and, for the 



Lord De Tahley 195 

sake of courtesy and decency, the less said about it the 
better. I must repeat the word 'courtesy,' for, hke a 
subtle fragrance, it interpenetrated all he did or said. 
It seemed the natural aroma of an exquisitely sensitive, 
delicate, and considerate spirit. There was something 
archaic, almost, one might say, hierarchical, about his 
head, with its long, rippled, grey hair, the transparent 
pallor of complexion, the piercing eye. He dressed 
with the same severity, and, though I never heard him 
speak of religion, there was about him a certain monastic 
stateliness of air which one sees most frequent'y in 
those who combine worldly position with the possession 
of a tranquillising faith. He contrived to inspire 
affection to a singular extent. Perhaps there was a 
certain pathos about his life and the strange contradic- 
tions it contained, but I think there was also in him a 
deep need of affection, and, in spite of his determined 
effort after courage and calm, an intimate despair of 
gaining the encouragement of others." 

This is beautifully said, I think, and delicately felt, 
yet, like all our attempts to analyse the fugitive charm 
of this extraordinary being, it leaves the memory un- 
satisfied. 



TORU DUTT 



Toru Dutt 

If Toru Dutt were alive, she would still (in 1882) be 
younger than any recognised European writer, and 
yet her fame, which is already considerable, has been 
entirely posthumous. Within the brief space of four 
years which now divides us from the date of her 
decease, her genius has been revealed to the world 
under many phases, and has been recognised in 
France and England. Her name, at least, is no 
longer unfamiliar in the ear of any well-read man or 
woman. But at the hour of her death she had pub- 
lished but one book, and that book had found but two 
reviewers in Europe. One of these, M. Andrd Theuriet, 
the well-known poet and novelist, gave the Sheaf 
gleaned in French Fields adequate praise in the Revue 
des Deux Mondes; but the other, the writer of the 
present notice, has a melancholy satisfaction in having 
been a little earlier still in sounding the only note of 
welcome which reached the dying poetess from England. 
It was while Professor W. Minto was editor of the 
Examiner^ that one day in August, 1876, in the very 
heart of the dead season for books, I happened to be 
in the office of that newspaper, and was upbraiding the 
whole body of publishers for issuing no books worth 



200 Critical Kit-Kats 

reviewing. At that moment the postman brought in a 
thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian post- 
mark on it, and containing a most unattractive orange 
pamphlet of verse, printed at Bhowanipore, and entitled 
* 'A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields^ by Toru Dutt. " This 
shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without 
preface or introduction, seemed specially destined by 
its particular providence to find its way hastily into 
the waste-paper basket. I remember that Mr. Minto 
thrust it into my unwilling hands, and said " There ! see 
whether you can't make something of that." A hope- 
less volume it seemed, with its queer type, published 
at Bhowanipore, printed at the Saptahiksambad Press ! 
But when at last I took it out of my pocket, what was 
my surprise and almost rapture to open at such verse 
as this : 

Still barred thy doors 1 The far-east glows^ 

The morning wind blows fresh and free, 
Should not the hour that wakes the rose 
Awaken also thee ? 

All look for thee. Love, Light, and Song—— 

Light in the sky deep red above, 
Song, in the lark of pinions strong, 

And in my heart, true Love* 

Apart we miss our nature's goal. 

Why strive to cheat our destinies ? 
Was not my love made for thy soul? 

Thy beauty for mine eyes? 



Toru Dutt 20 1 



No longer sleepy 

Ohy listen now ! 
J tvait and weepy 

But where art thou I 

When poetry is as good as this it docs not much 
matter whether Rouveyre prints it upon Whatman 
paper, or whether it steals to light in blurred type from 
some press in Bhowanipore. 

Toru Dutt was the youngest of the three children of 
a high-caste Hindu couple in Bengal. Her father, 
who survived them all, the Baboo Covin Chundcr Dutt, 
was himself distinguished among his countrymen for 
the width of his views and the vigour of his intelligence. 
His only son, Abju, died in 1865, ^^ the age of fourteen, 
and left his two younger sisters to console their parents. 
Aru, the elder daughter, born in 1854, was eighteen 
months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, 
who was born in Calcutta on the 4th of March, 1856. 
With the exception of one year's visit to Bombay, 
the childhood of these girls was spent in Calcutta, at 
their father's garden-house. In a poem I printed for 
the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest 
memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining 
tank with the round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring 
dusk under the vast branches of the central casuarina- 
tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to 
an European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, 
the brain of this wonderful child was moulded She 
was pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her 



202 Critical Kit-Kats 

race and blood, and preserving to the last her apprecia- 
tion of the poetic side of her ancient religion, though 
faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had been cast aside 
with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith. 
Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and 
legends of their people, stories which it was the last 
labour of her life to weave into English verse ; but it 
would seem that the marvellous faculties of Toru's 
mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her 
father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn 
English and French. To the end of her days Toru 
was a better French than English scholar. She loved 
France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its 
language with more perfect elegance. The Dutts 
arrived in Europe at the' close of 1869, and the girls 
went to school, for the first and last time, at a French 
pension. They did not remain there very many 
months ; their father took them to Italy and England 
with him, and finally they attended for a short time, 
but with great zeal and application, the lectures for 
women at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went 
back again to Bengal, and the four remaining years oi 
Toru's life were spent in the old garden-house at 
Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and 
imaginative production. When we consider what she 
achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is 
impossible to wonder that the frail and hectic body 
succumbed under so excessive a strain. 

She brought with her from Europe a store of 
knowledge that would have sufficed to make an English 



Toru Dutt 



or French girl seem learned, but which in her case was 
simply miraculous. Immediately on her return she 
began to study Sanskrit with the same intense applica- 
tion which she gave to all her work, and mastering the 
language with extraordinary swiftness, she plunged into 
its mysterious literature. But she was born to write, 
and despairing of an audience in her own language, 
she began to adopt ours as a medium for her thought. 
Her first essay, published when she was eighteen, 
was a monograph in the Bengal Magazine, on Leconte 
de Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy 
which is very easy to comprehend. The austere poet 
of La Mori de Vahniki was, obviously, a figure to 
whom the poet of Sindhu must needs be attracted on 
approaching European literature. This study, which was 
illustrated by translations into English verse, was fol- 
lowed by another on Josdphin Soulary, in whom she saw 
more than her maturer judgment might have justified. 

There is something very interesting and now, alas 1 
still more pathetic in these sturdy and workmanlike 
essays in unaided criticism. Still more solitary her 
work became, in July, 1874, when her only sister, 
Aril, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have 
been no less amiable than her sister, and if gifted with 
less originality and a less forcible ambition, to have 
been finely accomplished. Both sisters were well- 
trained musicians, with full contralto voices, and Aru had 
a faculty for design which promised well. The romance 
o^ Mile. D'Arvers was originally projected for Aru to 
illustrate, but no page of this book did Aru ever see. 



204 Critical Kit-Kats 

In 1876, as we have seen, appeared that obscure 
first volume at Bhowanipore. The Sheaf gleaned in 
French Fields is certainly the most imperfect of Toru's 
writings, but it is not the least interesting. It is a 
wonderful mixture of strength and weakness, of genius 
overriding great obstacles and of talent succumbing to 
ignorance and inexperience. That it should have been 
performed at all is so extraordinary that we forget to 
be surprised at its inequality. The English verse is 
sometimes exquisite ; at other times the rules of our 
prosody are absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that 
the Hindu poetess was chanting to herself a music 
that is discord in an English ear. The notes are no less 
curious, and to a stranger no less bewildering. Nothing 
could be more na'ive than the writer's ignorance at some 
points, or more startling than her learning at others. 

On the whole, the attainment of the book was 
simply astounding. It consisted of a selection of 
translations from nearly one hundred French poets, 
chosen by the poetess herself on a principle of her own 
which gradually dawned upon the careful reader. She es- 
chewed the Classicist writers as though they had never 
existed. For her Andrd Chenier was the next name 
in chronological order after Du Bartas. Occasionally 
she showed a profundity of research that would have 
done no discredit to Mr. Saintsbury or le doux Asselli- 
neau. She was ready to pronounce an opinion on 
Napol le Pyrenean or to detect a plagiarism in Baude- 
laire. But she thought that Alexander Smith was still 
alive, and she was curiously vague about the career of 



Toru Dutt 20; 



Sainte Beuve. This inequality of equipment was a 
thing inevitable to her isolation, and hardly worth 
recording, except to show how laborious her mind was, 
and how quick to make the best of small resources. 

We have already seen that the Sheaf gleaned in 
French Fields attracted the very minimum of attention 
in England. In France it was talked about a little 
more. M. Garcin de Tassy, the famous Orientalist, 
who scarcely survived Toru by twelve months, spoke 
of it to Mile. Clarisse Bader, author of a somewhat 
remarkable book on the position of women in ancient 
Indian society. Almost simultaneously this volume 
fell into the hands of Toru, and she was moved to 
translate it into English, for the use of Hindus less 
instructed than herself. In January, 1877, she accord- 
ingly wrote to Mile. Bader requesting her authorisation, 
and received a prompt and kind reply. On the i8th of 
March Toru wrote again to this, her solitary corre- 
spondent in the world of European literature, and her 
letter, which has been preserved, shows that she had 
already descended into the valley of the shadow of 
death : 

" Ma constitution n'est pas forte ; j'ai contracts une 
toux opiniatre, il y a plus de deux ans, qui ne me 
quitte point. Cependant j'espere mettre la main k 
I'oeuvre bientot. Je ne peux dire, mademoiselle, combien 
votre affection — car vous les aimez, votre livre et votre 
lettre en t^moignent assez — pour mes compatriotes et 
mon pays me touche ; et je suis fiere de pouvoir le dire 
que les hdrofnes de nos grandes ^pop^es sont dignes de 



2o6 Critical Kit-Kats 

tout honneur et de tout amour. Y a-ti-il d'heroYne plus 
touchante, plus aimable que Sita ? Je ne le crois pas. 
Qitand f eniends ma mkre chanter^ le soir, les vieux chants 
de nofre pays, je pleure presque toiijours. La plainte de 
Sita, quand, bannie pour la seconde fois, elle erre dans 
la vaste foret, seule, le desespoir et Teffroi dans Tame, 
est si pathetique qu'il n'y a personne, je crois, qui 
puisse I'entendre sans verser des larmes. Je vous 
envois sous ce pli deux petites traductions du Sanscrit* 
cette belle langue antique. Malheureusement j'ai et^ 
obligee de faire cesser mes traductions de Sanscrit, il y 
a six mois. Ma sant6 ne me permet pas de les 
continuer." 

These simple and pathetic words, in which the dying 
poetess pours out her heart to the one friend she had, 
and that one gained too late, seem as touching and as 
beautiful as any strain of Marceline Valmore's immortal 
verse. In English poetry I do not remember anything 
that exactly parallels their resigned melancholy. Before 
the month of March was over, Torn had taken to her 
bed. Unable to write, she continued to read, strewing 
her sick room with the latest European books, and 
entering with interest into the questions raised by the 
Society Asiatique of Paris in its printed Transactions, 
On the 30th of July she wrote her last letter to Mile. 
Clarisse Bader, and a month later, on the 30th of 
August, 1877, at the age of twenty-one years, six 
months, and twenty-six days, she breathed her last in- 
her father's house in Maniktollah Street, Calcutta. 

In the first distraction of grief it seemed as though 



Toru Diitt 207 



her unequalled promise had been entirely blighted, and 
as though she would be remembered only by her single 
book. But as her father examined her papers, one 
completed work after another revealed itself. First a 
selection from the sonnets of the Comte de Grammont, 
translated into English, turned up, and was printed in 
a Calcutta magazine ; then some fragments of an 
English story, which was printed in another Calcutta 
magazine. Much more important, however, than any 
of these was a complete romance, written in French, 
being the identical story for which her sister Aru had 
proposed to make the illustrations. In the meantime 
Toru was no sooner dead than she began to be famous. 
In May, 1878, there appeared a second edition of the 
Sheaf gleaned in French Fields^ with a touching sketch 
of her death, by her father; and in 1879 was published, 
under the editorial care of Mile. Clarisse Bader, the 
romance of Le Journal de Mile, UArvers^ forming a 
handsome volume of 259 pages. .This book, begun as 
it appears before the family returned from Europe, and 
finished nobody knows when, is an attempt to describe 
scenes from modern French society, but it is less in- 
teresting as an experiment of the fancy, than as a 
revelation of the mind of a young Hindu woman of 
genius. The story is simple, clearly told, and interest- 
ing ; the studies of character have nothing French 
about them, but they are full of vigour and originality. 
The description of the hero is most characteristically 
Indian : 

" II est beau en effet. Sa taille est haute, mais 



20 8 Critical Kit-Kats 

quelques-uns la trouveraient mince ; sa chevelure noire 
est bouclee et tombe jusqu'a la nuque ; ses yeux noirs 
sont profonds et bien fend us ; le front est noble ; la 
levre superieure, couverte par une moustache naissante 
et noire, est parfaitement modelee ; son menton a 
quelque chose de severe ; son teint est d'un blanc 
presque feminin, ce qui denote sa haute naissance." 

In this description we seem to recognise some Surya 
or Soma of Hindu mythology, and the final touch, 
miCaningless as applied to an European, reminds us 
that in India whiteness of skin has always been a sign 
of aristocratic birth, from the days when it originally 
distinguished the conquering Aryas from the indi- 
genous race of the Dasyous. 

As a literary composition Mile. UArvers deserves 
considerable commendation. It deals with the ungovern- 
able passion of two brothers for one placid and beautiful 
girl, a passion which leads to fratricide and madness. 
That it is a very melancholy and tragical story is 
obvious from this brief suggestion of its contents, but it is 
remarkable for coherence and self-restraint no less than 
for vigour of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to 
melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and 
the wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and 
unreal. 

But I believe that the original English poems, which 
I presented to the public for the first time in 1882, will 
be ultimately found to constitute Tora's chief legacy to 
posterity. These ballads form the last and most 
matured of her writings, and were left so far fra. mentary 



Torn Dutt 209 



at her death that the fourth and fifth in her projected 
series of nine were not to be discovered in any form 
among her papers. It is prol^nble that she had not 
even commenced them. Her father, therefore, to give 
a certain continuity to the series, filled up these blanks 
with two stories from the VisJinupurana which origi- 
nally appeared respectively in the Calcutta Revicu) 
and in the Bengal Magazine. These are interesting, 
but a little rude in form, and they have not the same 
peculiar value as the rhymed octo-S3'llabic ballads. In 
these last we see Toru no longer attempting vainly, 
though heroically, to compete with European literature 
on its own ground, but turning to the legends of her 
own race and country for inspiration. No modern 
Oriental has given us so strange an insight into the 
conscience of the Asiatic as is presented in the stories 
of "Prehlad" and of "Savitri/'or so quaint a piece 
of religious fancy as the ballad of " Jogadhya Uma." 
The poetess seems in these verses to be chanting to 
herself those songs of her mother's race to which she 
always turned with tears of pleasure. They breathe a 
Vedic solemnity and simplicity of temper, and are 
singularly devoid of that littleness and frivolity which 
seem, if I may judge by a slight experience, to be the 
bane of modern Indian literature. 

As to the merely technical character of the poems, 
it may be suggested that in spite of much in them that 
is rough and inchoate, they show that Toru was 
advancing in her mastery of English verse. Such a 
stanza as this, selected out of many no less skilful 

o 



2IO Critical Kit-Kats 

could hardly be recognised as the work of one by 
whom the language was a late acquirement : 

What glcrious trees ! The sombre saul. 

On which the eye delights to rest — 
The betel-nut, a pillar tall. 

With feathery branches for a crest — 
The light-leaved tamarind spreading wide—^ 

The pale faint- scented bitter neem. 
The seem u I, gorgeous as a bride. 

With flowers that have the rubfs gleam. 

In other passages, of course, the text reads like a trans- 
lation from some stirring ballad, and we feel that it 
gives but a faint and discordant echo of the music 
welling in Toru's brain. For it must frankly be con- 
fessed that in the brief May-day of her existence she 
had not time to master our language as Blanco White 
did, or as Chamisso mastered German. To the end of 
her days, fluent and graceful as she was, she was not 
entirely conversant with English, especially with the 
colloquial character of modern speech. Often a very 
fine thought is spoiled for hypercritical ears by the queer 
turn of expression which she has innocently given to 
it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree 
in her miscellaneous poeitis. Her sonnets, printed in 
1882, seem to me to be of great beauty, and her longer 
piece entitled ** Our Casuarina Tree," needs no apology 
for its rich and mellifluous numbers : 

Like a huge python, winding round and round 
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars^ 



Torn Diitt 2 1 I 



Up to its very summit near the stars, 
A creeper climbsy in whose embraces bound 

No other tree could live. But gallantly 
The giant wears the scarj, and fewer s are hung 
In crimson clusters all the boughs among^ 

Whereon all da^ are gathered bird and bee ; 
And oft at nights the garden overfows 
With one sweet song that seem^ to have no close^ 
Sung darkling from our tret while men repose. 
When fr St my casement is wide open thrown 

At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest ; 

Sometimes — and most in winter — on its crest 
A grey baboon sits statue-like alone 

Watching the sunrise ; while on lower boughs 
His puny offspring leap about and play ; 
And far and near kokilas hail the day ; 

And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows / 
And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast 
By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast, 

The water-lilies spring, like snozv enmassed, 

• # • • 

Therefore 1 fain would consecrate a lay 
Unto thy honour. Tree, beloved of those 
Who now in bkssed sleep, for aye, repose; 
Dearer than life to me, alas I were they I 

MaysU thou be numbered when my days are dtne 
With deathless Trees — like those in Borrowdale, 
Under whose azvful branches lingered pale 

*' Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton. 
And Time, the shadow y" and though weak the verse 
That would thy bciiuty fain, oh fain rehearse. 
May Love defend thee from Oblivion'' s curse. 



212 Critical Kit-Kats 

It is difficult to exaggerate when we try to estimate 
what we have lost in the premature death of Toru Dutt. 
Literature has no honours which need have been be- 
yond the grasp of a girl who before the age of twenty^ 
one, and in languages separated from her own by so 
deep a chasm, had produced so much of lasting worth. 
And her courage and fortitude were worthy of her in- 
telligence. Among ** last words " of celebrated people, 
that which her father has recorded, *^ It is only the 
physical pain that makes me cry," is not the least re- 
markable, or the least significant of strong character. 
It was to a native of our island, and to one ten years 
senior to Toru, to whom it was said, in words more 
appropriate, surely, to her than to Oldham, 

Thy generous fruits^ though gathered ere their prime, 

Still showed a quickness, and maturing tim,e 

But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rime, 

That mellow sweetness was all that Toru lacked to 
perfect her as an English poet, and of no other Oriental 
who has ever lived can the same be said. When the 
history of the literature of our country comes to be 
written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this 
fragile exotic blossom of song. 

1882. 



M. JOSE-MARIA DE HEREDIA 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 

1 HAT M. Zola will, in due course of time, push his 
way into the Institute, and become authorised to wear 
the greenest of palm-shoots, is doubtless inevitable, nor 
have I any objection to offer. But, for the life of me, 
I cannot understand wh}', all of a sudden, the English 
press has become so exceedingly anxious to see this 
little affair of literary honour arranged. The reception 
given in this country to the latest election at the French 
Academy was comically unaccountable. Why has it 
abruptly become necessary that a dignified, ancient and 
scholarly body should open its doors to the author of 
Pot-Bouille^ knocking so noisily upon them with re- 
verberations of congenial brass ? The spirit of modern 
democracy, we are told, demands that the possessor of 
such swarms of editions should be an Academician, and 
when he is kept waiting for a little while (it wnll only be 
for a little while — calm yourself, beating heart of the 
democracy !), shouts out that the Academy is decrepit 
and obsolete, and must be swept off the face of the earth. 
Permit the great M. Zola to kick his heels in the cold, 
while you let in a gentleman who has only written a few 
sonnets? Shameful nepotism, shocking decrepitude I 
The fact is, it is time that we should cease to laugh at 



2i6 Critical Kit-Kats 

the French for their affection for the Russians. We are 
making ourselves still more ridiculous by our prepos- 
terous solicitude for M. Zola. 

With those who regret that our Tudor kings started 
no such literary order of merit as the French Academy, 
I do not greatly sympathise, and still less with those 
who recommend the creation to-day of a brand-new in- 
stitution of the kind. Still, looking across the water 
to France, I do see that there are functions which so 
ancient a body as that which sits in the Mazarine Palace 
can, and does, exercise with high advantage to the 
public. The inclusion of M. Zola, though not neces- 
sarily foreign to the aim of such a body, does eminently 
strike me as not being one of those functions. He has 
his editions, his wealth, and his fame, the tributes of 
the democracy. But what a set of men in the position 
of the thirty-nine electing Academicians, raised above 
fear of public displeasure, made a law unto themselves, 
can do is to protect and reward distinguished and deli- 
cate talent, of a very original order, which does not 
appeal to the loud public. The French Academy can 
afford to wave aside the novelist who comes with 
all his drums and trumpets, and a flushed cohort 
of camp followers shouting in his wake, and can say 
to the poet who does not strive nor cry, who culti- 
vates a noble art in austerity, "Be pleased, sir, to 
join our company ; there will be room for this popular 
gentleman by-and-by." That the French Academy 
has done this by electing M. de Heredia to the seat 
vacated by the death of M. de Mazade seems to me 



M. Jose-Maria de HercJia 217 

an unusually efTective exercise of a wholesome and 
valuable privilege. 

Wholesome, because it is necessary for the health of 
the intellectual life in this crowded and degenerated 
atmosphere of ours to be encouraged to climb the heights 
and taste the colder air ; valuable, because it rewards a 
decent and dignified ambition in a mode that is more 
direct than any other which is open to the literary world 
of to-day. The election of M. de Hercdia to the French 
Academy is an important and critical event in the 
imaginative history of our time, because it is a public 
statement of the value set by a group of men of high 
and yet dissimilar intellectual character on work that is 
superlatively well done, on the work of a craftsman who 
has not allowed himself to be hurried or disturbed by 
any pressure from w^ithout, who has not cared to move 
an inch from his path to please the many or the few, 
who has spent half a lifetime in the pursuit of a 
splendid perfection, a faultless magnificence in concen- 
trated and chiselled verse. It is the occasional appear- 
ance, in our slipshod world, of artists so consummate 
as M. de Hcredia that keeps poetry from being degraded 
to a mere shabby volubility. Dafa Rofnanis venia est 
indigiia pociis^ and the only way in which the standard 
can be raised to its normal severity is by occasional 
reference to those writers who live up to the most rigid 
executive ideal. It is as a jew^eller in verse, a poetical 
artificer of the very highest merit that M. de Heredia 
has earned for himself the applause of the Institute. 
We hear a great deal of the experimentalists who are 



21 8 Critical Kit-Kats 

trying to dissolve and deliquesce the prosody of France. 
Let us acquaint ourselves, in justice, with the man who 
has done most during the last ten years to keep it as 
hard and as brilliant as fine bronze. 



So far as I am aware, no biography or even bio- 
graphical sketch of M. de Heredia has ever been pub- 
lished. His is the proud and self-contained nature, no 
doubt, that shrinks from publicity as from a familiar 
touch. The details I give below are the mosaic of an 
affectionate though secret admirer, who has carefully 
stored up, through more than twenty years, every scrap 
of information which has fallen in his way respecting 
a poet whose genius is intimately sympathetic to him. 

Jose-Maria de Heredia is a Cuban by birth. He 
traces his ancestry direct from one of the first con- 
querors of the New World. He is of the bluest blood 
of Spanish colonial aristocracy. He tells me that he is 
the direct descendant of that Adelantado don Pedro de 
Heredia, who came to America in the company of the 
second Admiral Diego Columbus, and who founded 
Cartagena in the West Indies. To this ancestor he 
has alluded in several of his poems. In the extreme 
south of the island, above the bay and city of Santiago 
de Cuba, in a glen of the Sierra Maestra looking over 
the ocean southward towards Jamaica, he was born on 
the 22nd of November, 1842. His home was the 
coffee plantation of La Fortuna, one of the last posses- 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 219 

sions of a noble but impoverished family. On tlic 
mother's side, however, he is of French origin. At 
the age of eight he was brought to Paris, and received 
his earliest education at the College of St. Vincent at 
Senlis. Nine years in Europe made a Frenchman of 
him, but at seventeen he went back to Cuba. For a 
year he worked at the University of Havannah ; then, 
about i860, finally returned to France, and took up his 
studies in the law. He tells me that he sadly neglected 
them, and then, with greater zest, entered the Ecole 
des Chartes. In Cuba, I am told, they reproach him 
with having robbed Spain of a Spanish poet ; but, 
in truth, M. de Pleredia is scarcely more a Spaniard 
than Rossetti was an Italian. 

In 1862 he published his first verses in the then 
existing Revue de Park, the far-away ancestor of MM. 
Darmesteter and Ganderax's new venture. I know 
not what these "first verses " were. But in 1866 he 
was one of the happy band of lyric boys who started 
the Pamasse Contcmporain^ that Germ of France. This 
anthology was brought oiit under the auspices and the 
patronage of M. Leconte de Lisle, whose influence over 
recent French poetry has been greater than that of 
any other person. Among the youthful Parnassian* 
were almost all the men who have since that day come 
prominently to the front in poetical literature — Sully 
Prudhomme and Francois Coppee, Paul Verlaine and 
CatuUe Mendes, Stdphane Mallarmd and Ldon Dierx. 
Among them, and from the very first, the young 
Heredia distinguished himself by the severe ideal of 



220 Critical Kit-Kats 

his art, and by his disdain of the common tricks by 
which men rise. He remembered the blood of the 
founder of Cartagena. 

In one of his deHcious essays, M. Anatole France, 
himself a Parnassian, recalls the features of that happy 
tim.e. He has a little vignette portrait of each of his 
old comrades, and here is what he says of the poet of 
Les Trophees : 

" Alone, or almost alone, in our cenade, M. Jose- 
Maria de Heredia, although defrauded of a great part 
of the treasure of his ancestors, the conquistador eSy 
affected the young gentleman of fashion, and smoked 
excellent cigars. His neckties were as splendid as his 
sonnets. But it was of the sonnets alone that we were 
jealous ; for we all disdained the gifts of fortune. We 
loved nothing but fame, and we wished that if we were 
famous it might be in a discreet and almost secret 
way." 

Alread}^, in this ver}^ early time, it was the magnifi- 
cent precision of Heredia's sonnets which attracted the 
attention of his elders ; and Theophile Gautier, that 
benevolent Olympian, exclaimed, on putting down the 
Parnasse Contemporain^ '^ Heredia, I love you, be- 
cause the name you bear is exotic and sonorous, and 
because you make verses that curl up at the ends like 
heraldic scallops." 

The rest of the Parnassians, one after another, com- 
mitted little volumes of independent verse, the first 
steps in so many active poetic careers. M. de Heredia 
alone remained aloof and impersonal, now and then 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 221 

dropping an impeccable sonnet into somebody else's 
nest. He was prominent in the second Parnasse 
ContcwporaiHy that of 1869. My own first acquaint- 
ance with him was made in a volume of So7vtcts et 
Eattx- forties, published by Lemerre in 1869, and now 
extremely rare. I copied out, more than twenty years 
ago, from this expensive and unattainable work, a 
sonnet which appeared to me then, as it still appears, 
of a magnificent and refulgent perfection. This was 
Lcs Couqiicrants^ now the first of a sequence of eight 
poems : 

Comme un vol ae gerfauts hors du charnier natal. 
Fatigues de porter leurs mishes hautainesj 
De Pal OS de Moguer, routiers et capitaines 
Partaient^ ivres d'un reve k'ero'ique et brutaL 

Us allaient conquerir le fabuleux metal 
^e Cipango murit dans ses mines lointaines, 
Et les vents alizes inclinaient leurs antennes 
Aux bords mysterieux du monde Occidental, 

Chaque soir, esperant des lendemains epiqueSy 
Vaxur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques 
Enchantait leur sommeil d'un mirage dore ; 

Ou penches a I'avant des blanches caravelles^ 
lis regardaient monter en un del ignore 
Du fond de r Ocean des etoiles no uv elks, 

A little later, in the charming Le Lt'vre des Sonnets 
edited by Charles Asselineau, other specimens came to 
light, and under the same mysterious conditions. It 



222 Critical Kit-Kats 

became, at last, a sort of collector's joy to watch 
the newspapers and reviews for stray sonnets of 
Heredia. Once there came, I forget where, a batch of 
no fewer than twenty-five at once, an event only to be 
paralleled, as a fact of exciting poetical significance, 
with the publication of Rossetti's House of Life in the 
Fortnightly Review fox 1869. Those were days when 
a man might trudge forth from his house at the morn- 
ing hour and meet angels in the street. "A happy 
time that was," as Wordsworth says, "triumphant 
looks Were then the common language of all eyes." I 
hope the young poetical fellows nowadays enjoy them- 
selves with as much gaiety as we did in our implacable 
fanaticism for verse ; but I fancy that the incessant 
paragraph and the newspaper column, avid of informa- 
tion, must lessen their pleasures. Half of ours lay in 
cjur remoteness and our concentrated narrowness of 
interest. 

Much has changed since then, both in London and 
Paris. The whole face of fashion has altered ; the 
most famous names have become part of the heritage 
of history; youth, that made us what we were, and 
painted the dull places with such fiery colours, has 
passed. Only one thing remains absolutely unchanged, 
and that is the work of M. de Heredia. He reminds 
us of some craftsman in his studio, fingering his wax 
and hammering his thin plates of metal, while an army 
marches into his town, and is in turn driven out of it. 
He looks up, pale and dreamy, at the fall of afternoon, 
and has not heard an echo of the long day's battle. 



M. Jose-Maria de Hcredia 223 

The poet fashions his exquisite verses, one by one, 
and the world may look at them or not, as it pleases. 
Last summer, for the first time, M. de Hercdia deigned 
to collect his scattered sonnets into a volume, Lcs 
TropJiccs* a thirteenth edition of which had been 
printed before the close of 1893. If he waited long, 
until his life had passed its fiftieth year, before making 
an appeal to the great public, his reticence has received 
its reward. Rarely, indeed, has a book of poems so 
severe in form, making so stern a demand upon the 
gravity of the reader, achieved so substantial a success. 
And now, with the slender yellow volume of Lcs Tro- 
phe'cs in his hand, he steps lightly up the staircase of 
the French Academy. 



In all the literatures of Europe, the sonnet is pre- 
eminent in its pathetic and rhetorical forms. It is 
mainly subjective and Petrarchan. Any reader who 
turns over the leaves of a competent selection of English, 
or French, or Italian sonnets must be struck with the 
fact that in their large majority they express the secret 
sentiment or emotional experience of the soul, and that 
even where they seem to be descriptive, they deal mainly 
with the effect of external phenomena on the moods 
of the writer. No species of poetry is more confidential 
than the sonnet ; none has been used, since its first 

* Les Trcphees. Par Jose-Maria de Heredia. Paris : Alphonse Lemerre, 
1893. 



224 Critical Kit-Kats 

invention, more persistently for the transmission of 
those secret thoughts which almost evade articulate 
expression. The innumerous sonnet-cycles of the 
Elizabethan age, from those of Shakespeare and 
Spenser downvi^ards, were either pure exercises in 
Petrarchan amorosity, or they gave voice to an im- 
possible emotion of which the direct utterance would 
have been indiscreet. The sonnets of Milton are louder 
in tone, and more impersonal ; they represent, how- 
ever, the element of pure and mellifluous eloquence 
rather than of detached poetical observation. The 
tone is no longer the whisper of a lover in pain, but 
although the sonneteer speaks from the rostrum, the 
appeal is always to his own experience and desires. 

It is the same in French poetry. It would be difficult 
to collect out of the abundant Petrarchist literature of 
the sixteenth century a very small anthology of really 
objective sonnets. There are one or two of Ronsard's ; 
there is the m3^sterious and beautiful octett of Amadis 
Jamyn's '' Les ombres, les esprits, les idoles afifreuses " ; 
it would require some research to discover any other 
specimens into which the personal note of confession, 
entreaty, or rhetoric did not enter. When the revival 
of the sonnet began — in England more than a hundred 
years ago, in France more recently — the form was 
again captured for purely subjective uses. There are, 
of course, a few impersonal examples of Wordsworth 
and Keats. In our own day we have received some 
exquisite objective sonnets from Miss Christina Rossetti. 
But these are rare in England, and no less rare in France, 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 225 

where the difTcrcnce between the two classes of sonnet, 
the introspective or philosophical, and the external or 
decorative, cannot be more clearly seen than by com- 
paring the work of the two most eminent living 
sonneteers of France — M. Sully Prudhomrae and M. 
de Heredia. If objective sonnets are rare in every 
collection, what must be our surprise to find that Les 
Trophecs consists exclusively of this species of com- 
position. 

In the hands of M. de Heredia the sonnet takes a 
form of absolute regularity. The two rhymes of his 
octett (ab-ba-ab-bd) never change their positions ; his 
sestett is permitted but two arrangements (ccd-cde or 
ccd-ccd). He permits himself no licence of any kind ; 
the frame is given to him, he has to fill it with absolute 
exactitude. This image of a picture in a gallery of 
paintings is one which it is difficult to dispense with in 
considering M. de Heredia's book. We find ourselves 
moving leisurely down a beautiful corridor, the walls of 
which are decorated, at regular intervals, with very 
highly finished panel-pictures, all of exactly the same 
size. It is now easy to understand why the public has 
been for so many 3'ears excluded from this gallery. 
The conscientious artist has not been willing that his 
work should be examined until it was complete, and 
the labour of completion has occupied half a lifetime. 
My eminent friend will forgive me, I think, if I quote 
in this connection a few words from a letter to myself : 
**Si je m'en suis tenu au sonnet," he says, " c'est que 
je trouve que dans sa forme k la fois mystique et 

P 



226 Critical Kit-Kats 

mathematique, c'est le plus beau des poemes k forme 
fixe et qu'il exige, par sa brievete et sa difficulte, une 
conscience dans I'execution et une concentration de la 
pensee qui ne peuvent qu'exciter et pousser a la per- 
fection I'artiste digne de ce beau nom." 

The first thing to be observed, in advancing along 
this rare and singular gallery, is that the paintings are 
by no means of an accidental arrangement or set in 
desultory sequence. The book is an attempt to present 
to the inward eye a regular series of carefully selected 
scenes from the imaginative history of the world. We 
shrink with horror from the notion of a weltgeschichte in 
quatorzains, and M. de Keredia, who is a master of the 
art of literary tact, would shudder sympathetically with 
us. What he designs is no more than a rapid descent 
of the ages, with here and there a momentary revela- 
tion of some highly suggestive and entertaining scene, 
or incident, or personage, rapidly given and as rapidly 
withdrawn, but seen for that moment with all the pre- 
cision and effulgence possible, so that in the dimness of 
the grey past this one figure or incident may blaze out 
like a veritable luminary. For this purpose, every- 
thing needless, trifling or accidental, every triviality of 
expression, every superfluous phrase or image, must 
be rigidly suppressed. In so sudden and brief a revela- 
tion every touch must burn. 

The central characteristic, then, of these splendid 
sonnets is their technical perfection. There is nothing 
loose or ungirt, nothing said vaguely because it would 
take time and labour to be precise. M. de Heredia 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 227 

opens his poem — for Lcs TropJurs is really one poem 
in many sections — with a sonnet "L'Oubli." Oblivion, 
indeed, is the enemy he attacks. The temple on the 
Grecian promontory is ruined ; its goddesses of marble 
and its heroes of bronze lie broken and defaced under 
the dry and wind-blown grasses ; the sea at the foot of 
the headland moans and bewails the dead sirens of long 
ago. Not stone and not metal can defy oblivion ; the 
only truly immortal art, which no caprice of man or 
time can destroy, is verse. And so, in verse that shall 
be as like hammered bronze and carven marble as he 
can make it, the proudest of modern poets will try to 
save the fleeting world of beauty from decay. 

Greece, first — since the savage and oriental parts of 
human development, which appeal so intimately to his 
master, M. Leconte de Lisle, have little or nothing to 
say to M. de Heredia. For him the symbol must be 
clear, brilliant, physical ; he has no pleasure in 
mysticism or in the twilight of the intelligence. And 
this, indeed, must be confessed at once, that those who 
seek for tender notes and sunken lights, the vague 
S3'mpathies of the soul, the melancholy music of 
experience, may go elsewhere ; the poet of Les Trophies 
is not for them. No man has less been touched by the 
malady of the age, no one is less attracted to the 
unknown and the distressful. M. de Heredia gazes 
straight at clear and beautiful things seen in a blaze of 
light ; almost every sonnet of his gives an impression 
of translucent air and brilliant sunshine. Alone, among 
French poets of to-day, the prevailing note of his work 



228 Critical Kit-Kats 

is joyous and heroic. Those ages of the world's 
history please him in which the symboHsm of the 
imagination was sumptuous and noble. He possesses 
not a little of the grandiloquence of the race from which 
he sprang. His sonnets have the sound of a clarion, 
the human voice concentrated and uplifted by being 
blown through fine brass. 

In the vestibule of his gallery of paintings we find 
six magnificent studies of Hercules and the Centaurs. 
This hero pleases him ; he goes forth against lions, 
against centaurs (those emblems of hysterical human 
weakness), against perplexed and obscure hydras ; he 
is strong and clear-headed, a lover of work strenuously 
fulfilled. So we find this story of Hercules told in a 
set of ringing sonnets, and we fancy ourselves opening 
the cabinet of a fifteenth-century Florentine medallist. 
With these and a few other exceptions, the Greek 
portion of Les Trophees may be passed over more 
rapidly than the rest. The sonnets dealing with the 
gods and the fiymphs are somewhat cold ; they are 
marble plaques in low relief, like fragments of a 
translation of Sophocles into sculpture. In this section 
of his book, the poet becomes most truly inspired, as 
it seems to me^ when he deals with the legend oi* 
Pegasus, an animal for whom he nourishes a very 
tender regard. From several Perseus and Andromeda 
sonnets I select one, as it seems to me, of incomparable 
beauty : 



M. Josc-Maria de Ilcrcdia 229 

Au milieu de P'ecume arritant son essor^ 
Le Cavalier vainqueur du monstre et de Meduse^ 
tluisseliint d'une have horrible ou le sang fuse ^ 
Em parte entre scs bras la vierge aux cheveux d^or, 

Sur Pe talon divin^frlre de Chrysaor, 
i^-'z piaff'e dans la mer et hennit et refuse, 
II a pose r Amante e per due et confuse 
^i lui rit et Petreint et qui sanglote encor, 

II Vembrasse. La houle enveloppe leur groupe. 

rile, d^un faible effort, ram>,ne sur la croupe 

Ses beaux picdj quenfuyant baise unfot vagabond: 

Mais Pegase irrite par le fouet de la lame, 
A Pappel du Her OS senlcvant d'un seul bond^ 
Bat le del ebloui de ses ailes de famme. 

As we decline to the latest schools of Greece, such 
successes as these are oftener repeated. In dealing with 
the sturdier pictures of antique Hfe, I think that no 
critic can deny the superiority of M. Leconte de Lisle. 
The Hyperion of Keats is probably the only modern 
rival of the best portions of Lcs Poemcs Antiques. 
M. de Heredia cannot connpress this vast music into the 
brief compass of his sonnet, nor do the exigencies of 
his form, complicated and concentrated as it is bound 
to be, permit these broader effects. But when it is 
noi the tragedians whom he essay's to follow, but when 
the lapidary art of the Aniliology inspires him, when a 
runner, or a charioteer, the tomb of a grasshopper, or 
the prayer of shepherds to Pan, is the subject of one 



230 Critical Kit-Kats 

of his lucid and admirable sonnets, then he rises to the 
height of his genius. Nor, let it at once be said, with 
this sympathy for the civilised decline of a social 
order, does any littleness, any alexandrianism, any 
love of the quip or the conceit find place. All is on a 
restrained scale, but as pure and dignified as a relief 
by Donatello. 

When the poet reaches Rome and the incursion of 
the Barbarians, the same characteristics are displayed. 
There is scarcely a touch of Virgil, nothing of Horace 
or Lucretius, but not a little of Catullus, and the very 
soul of Martial. Not merely, as may be seen by the 
comparison of the sonnet called " Lupercus " with the 
1 1 8th epigram of the first book, is the very wine of 
the last-named poet poured, without loss of a drop 
spilled or diluted, into the chalice of the sonnet, but 
that is said which the manner of Martial suggests, yet, 
if it be not blasphemy to think so, better said. Will the 
shade of Desire Nisard permit it to be whispered, for 
instance, that this is written as Martial would have 
written it, with modern knowledge, and a modern 
vocabulary to aid him ? 



AUX MONTAGNES DIVINES. 



Geminus Servus 
et pro suis conservis. 



Glaciers hieus, pics de marhre et d^ardoise, granits. 
Moraines dont le vent, du Nethou jusqu^a Begle, 
Arrache, brule et tord le froment et le seigle. 
Cols abrupt s^ lacs, for ets pleines d"* ombre et de rdds! 



M. Josc-Maria de Heredia 231 

Antres sourds^ noirs vallons que hs ancicns bannis^ 
Pluto t que de ployer sous la servile regle^ 
Hanterent avec Pours, le loupy Visard et Vnigle^ 
Precipices^ torrents, gouffres, soyez benis ! 

Ayant fui Pergastule et le dur municipe, 

Vesclave Geminus a d'cdi'e ce cippe 

Aux Mont 5^ gardiens sacres de Papre liber t'e ; 

Et sur ces sommets clairs ou le silence vibre, 

Dans Pair inviolable, immense et pur, jete^ 

Je erois entendre encor le cri d'un homme libre t 



In the section of his book entitled 77?^ Middle Ages 
and the Renaissance^ M. de Heredia rehnquishes himself 
to the pleasure of seizing little characteristic episodes, 
and treating them in the manner of a goldsmith. We 
find sonnets in which a picture of mediaeval societ}' is 
given with the rigidity, the clear, shadowless colour, 
and the transparency of a stained-glass window at 
Chartres or Le Mans; in which Balthazar, Melchior, 
and Caspar, on their road to Bethany, cross a back- 
ground of turquoise-coloured enamel ; in which an 
epitaph is murmured over the extremely irreligious 
corpse of Hyacinthe, Seigneur de Maugiron, while 
tears furrow the rose-paint on the cheeks of Henri III. ; 
in which a fading sheet of vellum, illuminated by Clovis 
Eve, is congratulated on having been caressed by the 
fingers of Diane de Poictiers. The censer, set with 
rubies, pearls, and beryls, over the chiselling of which 
Fray Juan de Segovia wore out his eyesight, this is 



232 Critical Kit-Kats 

more, one feels, to M. de Heredia than the ritual in 
which it is to be waved, and it is part of his sincerity 
that he apes no wide human sympathies in his con- 
spectus of historical impressions. 

But he is Cuban and a descendant of the Conquis- 
tadores; and he is lifted to more heroic flights, and 
a grander, because broader, conception of life, when, in 
a series of sonnets from which I have already quoted 
one, he celebrates the deeds of his colonial ancestors. 
He passes on to a lament over the decay of Spanish 
pride in the Americas, bewailing in one melodious 
sonnet after another the ruin of such dazzling hopes 
and the waste of prowess so magnificent. None of the 
poems of this section is more grandiose, nor any more 
interesting to us Englishmen, than the following on 
the decline of Cartagena ; 

A UNE VILLE MORTE. 

Cartagena de Indias, 
1532-1583-1697. 

Morne ViUe^jadis reine des Oceans! 
Aujourd^hui le requin pursuit en paix les scombres 
Et le nuage errant allonge seul des ombres 
Sur ta rade ou roulaient les gallons geants, 

Depuis Drake et Vassaut des Anglais me ere ant s^ 
Tes murs desempares croulent en noirs decombres^ 
Et, comme un glorieux collier de perles sombres, 
Des boulets de Pointis montrent les trous beants. 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 233 

Entre le del qui brule et la mcr qui moutonne^ 

Au somnolent soleil (Tun midi monotoney 

Tu songeSy Guerriere^ aux vieux Conquistadors ; 

Et dans V'cnervement des nuits chaudes et cnlmes^ 

Servant ta gloire eteinte, o Cite^ tu Vendors 

Sous les palmiers, au long fremissement des palmes. 

We pass on to " The Orient and the Tropics." Here, 
again, we seem to catch something of the accent of M. 
Leconte de Lisle, to whom such figures as Kham and 
Hathor seem naturally dedicated. But in Japan M. de 
Heredia recovers the whole of his originality. He has 
succeeded, alone among poets of the West, in extract- 
ing from the art and the history of that miraculous 
archipelago its heroic and chivalrous splendour. 

We are accustomed to an infusion of the sweeter 
tones, the more diaphanous graces of Japanese life into 
our poetry and our painting. What is novel, what M. de 
Heredia alone has given, is the mystery of the ancient 
aristocracy of Japan, with its fierce disregard of life, 
its savage sumptuousness, its extraordinary fulness of 
violent and vivid colour. He paints for us the Daimio 
on the field of battle, fluttering his satin-covered iron 
fan in front of his glaring eyes, while the lacquer coat- 
of-mail creaks on his panting bosom ; or he gives us so 
strange a glimpse into the life of bygone Japan as is 
packed into this amazing sonnet : 



234 Critical Kit-Kats 

LE SAMOURAI. 

C'etait un homme a deux sabres. 

D^un doigt distrait frolant la sonore bwa, 
A tr avers les bambous tresses en fine latte, 
Elle a vUj par la plage eblouissante et plate, 
S'avancer le vainqueur que son amour reva, 

C^est lui. Sabres aufianc, V event ail haut, il va. 
La cordeliere rouge et le gland ecarlate 
Coupent Varmure sombre, et, sur Pepaule, eclate 
Le blason de Hizen ou de Tokungazva. 

Ce beau guerrier vetu de lames et de plaques, 
Sous le bronze, la soie et les brillantes laques, 
Semble un crustace noir, gigantesque et vermeil, 

II Pa vue, II sourit dans la bar be du masque, 

Et son pas plus hdtif fait rehire au soleil 

Les deux antennes d^or qui tremblent a son casque. 

The sequence of Les Trophies closes with a series 
of selected sonnets entitled '' Nature and Dream." In 
these the poet quits the field of history, and concen- 
trates his vision on such episodes of modern life and 
landscape as are specially sympathetic to him. He 
admits many things here that help us to form an exact 
impression of his own mind. He dwells with affec- 
tionate complacency over the destruction of all that 
made Sicily what she was in antiquity, and the dura- 
bility amid the general wreck of a few coins in which 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 235 

the beauty of the Sicihan virgins is still immortal. He 
raises a picture of the gorgeous funerals of ancient 
Greek warriors, descending to Hades surrounded by 
all the pomp and glory of their fellow-countrymen, 
while the French poet himself will one of these days 
share the inglorious burial which is administered in turn 
to all members of the democracy ; 

Et pourtant fat reve ce destin glorieux 
De tomber au sohil a'uisi que lei a'ieuXy 
Jeune encore et pleure des h'eros et des vierges. 

In his aspect of nature, in his moods towards life as it 
manifests itself to us to-day, there is no petulance but 
a marked and ever-present sense of regretful loss, only 
to be redeemed by a passionate and vivid realisation of 
scenes and objects otherwise lost for ever. 

It should, perhaps, be added here that the volume of 
Lcs Trophecs is not entirely devoted to sonnets. There 
are three mediaeval Spanish romances, composed in 
tcrza 7'ifiia, and a somewhat extended epical study, in 
couplets, called Lcs Conquerants de VOr. Each of 
these is vigorously written, and worthy of study, but 
neither induces the critical reader to waver in his 
conviction that the sonnet was the province of poetry 
which M. de Heredia was born to occupy. 

Nor has he confined himself entirely to verse. M. de 
Heredia is the author of a translation, in four large 
volumes, of La ComjiUte du Mcxiqiic of Bernal Diaz, in 
which, by a sustained eftbrt of st^'le, he has transformed 
the entii-e nairative into such French of the sixteenth 



236 Critical Kit-Kats 

century as Agrippa d'Aubigne might have signed. 
Lastly, in 1894, in a little book illustrated by Daniel 
Vierge, the poet gave us a version of that curious 
picaresque romance, La Nonne Alferez, 



III 

To call Jose-Maria de Heredia a great poet would 
be to misuse language. He lacks the breadth and 
humanity of the leaders of poetry. But, beyond all 
question, he is a great poetic artist and probably the 
most remarkable now alive in Europe. The few 
quotations which I have been able to give in the 
preceding pages will undoubtedly be enough to prove 
this fact to any who have not yet made the acquaint- 
ance of his work ; and M. de Heredia is none of those 
writers from whom an indulgent reviewer can select 
pieces which give an impression of far higher merit 
than the perusal of the actual volume justifies. 

Perhaps his most singular characteristic, the evidence 
of a self-control almost without parallel in recent litera- 
ture, is the high level of workmanship which runs through 
his entire published poetry. He must sometimes write 
poor verse, one fancies, since he is mortal, but at least 
he never publishes it. Some numbers in Les Trophe'es 
are more interesting than others ; it is difficult to 
admit that any are better written. From beginning to 
end the book rings with melody, each sonnet brings 
up before the inward eye a luminous picture, in a clear 
sunlit atmosphere, flashing with colour, sharply defined, 



M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 237 

completely provided with every artifice and accomplish- 
ment of learning, taste, and craftsmanship. The only 
objection, indeed, which one is inclined to bring against 
M. de Heredia as a poet is the result of this uniform 
strenuousncss. One wishes that all were not quite so 
metallic in sound, so sumptuous in colour, so radiantly 
and sonorously objective. The softer stop is missed, 
the pathetic and mysterious qualities are neglected. 
But in these slipshod days, it is no small thing to find 
that poets still exist who hold their art in chivalric 
honour, and who would rather be banished from their 
country than allow a loose rhyme to escape them, or 
commit a solecism in prosody. 

1894. 



WALTER PATER 



Walter Pater 

A PORTRAIT 

Few recent events can have surprised and saddened 
the sincere lovers of Hterature more than the death, in 
middle life, of Walter Pater. A peculiar vexation, so 
to speak, was added to the natural grief such a loss 
must have caused, by the strange inexactitude, in 
matters of detail, which marked almost all the notices 
of his career which appeared at the time. In most of 
these notices, it is true, there was manifested a wish to 
pay homage to one oi the most exquisite, the most 
self-respecting, the most individual prose-writers of the 
age ; but knowledge, especially of his earlier years and 
intellectual development, was lacking. He was one 
who never had tempted the interviewer, who had never 
chatted to the press about himself, and facts regarding 
him were not at that abrupt moment forthcoming. 

How far accidents of time and place were responsible 
for aiding this condition of things it were now perhaps 
idle to speculate. The fame of Walter Pater will not be 
wrecked on the holiday of an editor or the indolence of 
a reporter. It is grounded on the respect which has 
not yet failed to follow pure and distinguished excel- 
lence in the art of writing. As years go on, he will 

Q 



242 Critical Kit-Kats 

more and more find his admirers, the rescuers of his 
renown. A subtle and penetrating essay by Mr. 
Lionel Johnson (in the Fortnightly Review for Sep- 
tember 1894) has already pointed the way to those 
whose business it will be to detect Pater's influence 
upon his age, and to illustrate the individual merits of 
his style. In the following pages an attempt will be 
made to present the facts of the uneventful career of 
the author of Marius, so oddly travestied at the moment 
of his death, with some regard to continuity and truth. 
In preparing this sketch, I have had the encouragement 
and the help of tne surviving members of his family, 
without whose co-operation 1 snouid not have under- 
taken such a task. 



A very considerable interest attaches to the parentage 
of Walter Pater. His family was of Dutch extraction, 
his immediate ancestors having, it is believed, come 
over from the Low Countries with William of Orange. 
I: was said, and our friend loved to believe it, that the 
court-painter, Jean Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau, 
was of the same stock. If so, the relationship must 
have been collater3\ and not direct, for when the 
creator of so many delicate fetes champetres was painting 
in Flanders — he died in 1 736 — the English Paters had 
already settled at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, where 
they lived all through the eighteenth century. Re- 
served and shy, preserving many of their Dutch 
customs, they are described in family tradition as 



Walter Pater 243 



mixing little with their neighbours, and as keeping 
through several generations this curious custom, that, 
while the sons were always brought up as Roman 
Catholics, the daughters were no less invariably trained 
in the Anglican faith. The father of Walter Pater 
quitted the Roman Church before his marriage, without 
adopting any other form of faith, and his two sons were 
the first Paters who were not brought up as Catholics. 

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, the 
poet Cowper was the fellow-townsman and the friend 
of the Dutch emigrants in Olney, and the family long 
possessed some of his verses in his own manuscript. 
The son of the man who had known Cowper quitted 
the Buckinghamshire household, and went out to 
America. He settled in New York, associating chiefly 
with the Dutch colony in that city ; here his son, 
Richard Glode Pater, the father of the critic, was born. 
The family came back in the beginning of the present 
century, and settled at Shadwell, on the north shore of 
the Thames, between Wapping and Stepney, a situation 
now of extreme squalor, but eighty years ago still con- 
sidered countrified and pleasant. Here, after his 
father's death, Richard Glode Pater continued to live, 
a medical practitioner working, mainly for the love of 
them, among poor folks in the East End, refusing to 
move into a more fashionable quarter, and despoiling 
himself of his patrimony by his constant benevolence. 

To the house in Shadwell, Richard Glode Pater 
brought Maria Hill as his wife, and here were born to 
him four children, two of them sons, of whom Walter 



244 Critical Kit-Kats 

was the second. The elder son, William Thomson 
Pater, adopted his father's profession, and became the 
head of a large lunatic asylum. He died unmarried, on 
April 24, 1887, at the age of fifty-two, "quitting," in 
his brother's words, " a useful and happy life." In 
him, however, with the exception of a marked pleasure 
in being surrounded with pretty objects, not a single 
feature had ever shown itself of the peculiar intellectual 
characteristics or tastes of his brother. The future 
critic was bom at Shadwell, on August 4, 1839, re- 
ceiving the names Waker Horatio, in compliment to a 
cousin w^ho survives him. 

Richard Glode Pater died so early that his second 
son scarcely remembered him in later life. The mother 
and grandmother left the house in Shadwell, and went 
to live with a sister of the former at Enfield, where the 
children were brought up. In the retired neighbour- 
hood of Chase Side they took a house, which has since 
been pulled down ; it possessed a large, old-fashioned 
garden, in which the children found great delight. It 
would be an error to trace in the imaginary portrait, 
called The Child in the House ^ a definite picture of the 
early surroundings of Walter Pater. The existence at 
Enfield is hardly touched upon there, with the sole 
exception of the "cry on the stair," announcing the 
death of Florian Deleal's father; this, it appears, is a 
reminiscence of the decease, not of his father, but of 
his grandmother, which was so announced to the house- 
hold at Enfield. So far as The Child in the House 
depicts a veritable scene, it presents to us Fish Hall, 



Walter Pater 245 



near Hadlow, Kent, the residence of his godmother 
and cousin, Mrs. Walter H. May ; this mansion, part 
of which was very old, was the favourite holiday-haunt 
of the little Paters, and a place of mystery and romance 
to Walter. 

If, however. The Child in the House must be accepted 
very guardedly as giving an impression of the physical 
surroundings of Walter Pater's childhood, much more 
of actual reminiscence has been put into Emerald Uth- 
wart (a story now reprinted in the Miscellaneous Studies). 
The first elements of education were given at the private 
house of the head-master of the grammar-school at 
Enfield, but the earliest crisis of Pater's life was the 
entrance into King's School, Canterbury, at the age of 
fourteen. The " old ecclesiastical city," to which 
Emerald proceeds, is Canterbury, closely and exactly 
described, and the features enumerated in the story — 
*' the curiosities of the Precincts, the * dark entry,' the 
rich heraldries of the blackened and mouldering cloister, 
the ruined overgrown spaces where the old monastery 
stood, the stones of which furnished material for the 
rambling prebends* houses" — these were features at 
Canterbury which immediately impressed the imagina- 
tion of the shy and sensitive little boy, and remained 
with him through life as having given him his earliest 
experience of aesthetic pleasure. 

It seems probable that, on the whole, this part of 
Emerald Uthivart may be taken as strictly autobio- 
graphical. Pater was happy at King's School, in spite 
of his complete indifference to outdoor games. In his 



246 Critical Kit-Kats 

first years at public school he was very idle and back- 
ward, nor was it till he reached the sixth form that his 
faculties seemed really to awaken. He is remembered 
as rather a popular boy, and as years went on his un- 
questioned ability inspired respect. On the day of 
Pater's funeral the Warden of Keble preached in the 
Cathedral of Canterbury, and was able to record, in 
touching phrases, the pride which the school had always 
felt in him, and Pater's own persistent attachment to the 
school. From the first, and before he went to Canter- 
bury, Walter had been considered the ** clever " one 
of the family ; not specially precocious, he was always 
meditative and serious — marked from the very first for 
the intellectual life. It is interesting to note that, quite 
without prompting from without, and while still at 
Enfield, all his thoughts were turned towards the 
Church. He loved best to organise a sort of solemn 
processional game, in which he took the part of bishop 
or cardinal. From the time when he first began to 
think of a future condition, his design was to be a 
clergyman ; never, curiously enough, a priest in the 
religion of his fathers, but in the Anglican ritual. 
Throughout life, it may here be said, even in his later 
days, when his thoughts turned back more and more 
to theological pre-occupations, Walter Pater never had 
any serious leaning towards Rome. Yet there can be 
little question that the heritage of his ancestors, in 
their obstinate adhesion to Catholicism, had much to 
do with his haunting sense of the value of the sensuous 
emblem, the pomp of colour and melody, in the offices 



Walter Pater 247 



of religion. These tendencies had received a great 
impetus while he was yet a little boy, and had not 
proceeded to Canterbury, from a visit he paid to a 
young friend who lived at Hursley. Here he attracted 
the attention of Keblc, who walked and talked much 
WMth him, and encouraged him in his religious aspira- 
tions. Pater retained through life a vivid recollection 
of this saintly man, although he never saw him again. 

Shortly before he left school, as he was entering his 
twentieth year. Pater read Modern Painters, and came 
very abruptly under the influence of Ruskin. The 
world of art was now for the first time opened to him. 
It is necessary at this point to refute an extraordinary 
fable, widely circulated at the time of his death, to the 
effect that the finished and beautiful essay on " Winckel- 
mann " was written, and even printed, while the author 
was a schoolboy at Canterbury. The idea is prepos- 
terous ; it was not until many years later that Pater 
became aware of the existence of the German critic, 
and his essay was composed and published long after 
he was a Fellow of Brasenose. It is singular, indeed, 
that he is not known to have made any attempt to 
write, either as a schoolboy or an undergraduate, his 
earUest essays being as mature in style as the author 
was mature in years. Pater made no painful experi- 
ments in authorship, or, if he did, he kept them to 
himself. He did not begin to practise the art of 
writing until he had mastered all its secrets. 

On June 11, 1858, he entered Queen's College, 
Oxford, as a com.moner, with an exhibition from Canter- 



248 Critical Kit-Kats 

bury ; and four years later, in the Michaelmas Term of 
1862, he took his degree, gaining only a second class 
in Literce Humaniores. Of these years of his under- 
graduate life it does not appear that there is much to 
reveal In bare rooms, in the dim back quadrangle of 
his College, Pater worked quietly and unobtrusively, 
making few friends, very shy and silent, hardly ob- 
served in the noisy Oxford life of thirty-five years ago. 
He was the pupil of Mr. W. W. Capes, now rector of 
Liphook, then bursar and tutor of Queen's, and amongst 
those very rare spirits who divined the man he was to 
be was his earliest friend, Mr. Ingram Bywater, now 
Regius Professor of Greek. It is not understood that 
during these undergraduate days Pater's mind, a seed 
slowly germinating in the darkness, showed much 
partiality for pure literature or for plastic art. He wais 
fascinated mainly by the study of logic and metaphysic, 
which were his pastimes, while the laborious business 
of classical scholarship occupied all but his leisure 
moments. Whether any record of these silent years 
remains, even with the few friends who shared them, 
seems doubtful. Pater never kept a diary, rarely wrote 
letters, and at this time offered no salient points for 
observation to seize upon. Yet one far-seeing man 
had noted the peculiar originality of Pater's tempera- 
ment. Having in the ordinary course of his studies 
submitted some work to Jowett, that astute observer 
was so much struck with his power that he very 
generously offered to coach him for nothing. The offer 
was gratefully accepted, and Pater used to describe the 



Walter Pater 249 



thrill of gratification, and, still more, of astonishment, 
which he experienced when Jowctt said to him one 
day, as he was taking his leave : " I think you have a 
mind that will come to great eminence." Unhappily, 
some years after there was a complete estrangement 
of sympathy between Jowett and Pater. But it is 
pleasant to record that, in the last year of the life of 
each, it was removed, and that Jowett was among those 
who congratulated Pater most cordially on his Plato 
and Platonism. 

In 1862 — his degree had been a disappointments- 
Pater, now three-and-twenty, took rooms in the High 
Street, Oxford, and read with private pupils. Of 
these Mr. T. H. S. Escott has told us in his pleasant 
reminiscences of Oxford that he was one. Another 
pupil, of somewhat later date, was Mr. Charles Lancelot 
Shad well, now Fellow of Oriel, destined to become the 
most intimate of all Pater's friends, and now the guar- 
dian and editor of his papers. But still no definite aim 
seemed to have revealed itself to the future critic ; he 
was reading and meditating deeply, but he had as 3'et 
no call to create. Time went by ; in 1864 Pater was 
elected a Fellow of Brasenose College, and went into 
residence there. With this change in his material 
existence, a change came over his mind. His sympathies 
grew wider and more human, he became more of a 
student of poetry, he formed more friendships, and was 
more assiduous in their cultivation. Of his earliest 
efforts after literary expression, all, it is believed, were 
destroyed by himself, with the solitary exception of the 



250 Critical Kit-Kats 

little study of a pure and brilliant spirit of youth, called 
^*Diaphaneite,"of whichtheMS., dated July 1864, was 
found after his dearti and published by Mr. Shadwell in 
the Miscellaneous Studies of 1895. At last, in 1866, at 
the age of twenty-seven, he ventured to write and to 
print a little essay, a note or fragment, on Coleridge. 
We may read this first expression of a new writer to- 
day in the Appreciations. We shall find little of the 
peculiar charm of the mature Pater. His interest is 
solely in Coleridge, the metaphysician, the critic of 
thought ; that this same philosopher was an exquisite 
poet has not occurred to him, he positively forgets to 
mention the fact. As far as style is concerned, the Httle 
essay is correct and cold, without oddity, but with little 
trace of the harmonious felicity which was about to 
develop. 

Vast is the change when we meet Walter Pater next. 
He had come from school with a tendency to value all 
things German. The teaching of Jowett and of T. H. 
Green tended to strengthen this habit, but Mr. Capes 
warned him against its excess, and endeavoured, at first 
with but little success, to attract him to the lucidity and 
gaiety of French literature. Pater's studies in philo- 
sophy now naturall}' brought him to Goethe, so massive 
an influence in the Oxford of that day, and the teaching 
of Goethe laid a deep impress upon his temperament, 
upon his whole outlook on the intellectual life. It was 
natural that one so delicately sensitive to the external 
symbol as was Pater should be prepared by the com- 
panionship of Goethe for the influence of a man who was 



Walter Pater 2 ; i 



Goethe's master in this one direction, and it was to a 
spirit inflammable in the highest degree that in 1866 
was laid the torch of Otto Jahn's Life of Winckclmann, 
the Biograpliische Au/scitze. There was everything in 
the character and career of the great German restorer 
of Hellenic feeling to fascinate Pater, who seemed, 
through Ruskin, Goethe and Hegel, to have travelled to 
his true prototype, to the one personality among the 
dead which was completely in sympathy with his own. 
Pater, too, among the sandhills of a spiritual Branden- 
burg, had held out arms of longing towards ideal beauty, 
revealed in physical or sensuous forms, yet inspired and 
interpenetrated with harmonious thought. The troubled 
feverish vision, the variegated and indeed over-decorated 
aesthetic of Ruskin, had become wearisome to Pater — 
not simple enough nor sensuous enough. Winckelmann 
was the master he wanted, who could " finger those 
pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense of 
shame or loss," who could live serenely " in a world of 
exquisite but abstract and colourless form ; " and it was 
with the study of Winckelmann that he became himself 
a writer. 

His famous essa3^on "Winckelmann " was the result 
of this new enthusiasm. It was published in the 
IVestniinster Reviiw for January 1867, the author being 
now in his twent^'-eighth year. From this time Pater's 
advance, though slow, w^as unbroken. Mr. John Morley 
having, in 1867, taken the editorship of the Fortnightly 
Revieiv, called around him immediately a group of the 
most brilliant young men of the day. Walter Pater was 



252 Critical Kit-Kats 

in no undue haste to respond to the appeal. In 1868, 
inventing a name which has since sunken into disrepute 
and even ridicule, he wrote an essay on ** Esthetic 
Poetry," in which the early work of Mr. William Morris 
received prompt and judicious analysis. Then followed 
the series which are still so potent in their peculiar 
charm, the magnificent and most characteristic " Notes 
on Lionardo de Vinci," in November 1869; the "Fra|;- 
ment on Sandro Botticelli" in August 1870; the ^* Pico 
della Mirandula " in October, and the ^' Michelangelo " 
in November 187 1. In 1873 most of these, and others, 
were published together in the memorable volume 
originally entitled Studies in the History of the Re- 
naissance. 

At this point he became partly famous. We may 
look back over the years which followed his fellowship, 
and see that, with the accession of humanistic ideas, 
he had gradually lost all belief in the Christian rehgion. 
This was the point, in his whole career, at which he 
was furthest from the Anglican faith. His intention, 
on relinquishing the idea of entering the Church of 
England, had been to become a Unitarian minister. 
This also he had abandoned by 1 864. But that Pater's 
interest in ecclesiastical matters was never really dead, 
and that it soon began to revive, is proved by an 
anecdote with which the Bishop of Peterborough 
obliges me. He remembers dining with him in 1873, 
in company with Bonamy Price. Conversation turned 
on ecclesiastical matters, and Pater passed on to a 
dreamy monologue about the beauty of the Reserved 



Walter Pater 253 



Sacrament in Roman churches, which " gave them all 
the sentiment of a house where lay a dead friend." 
This immediately aroused the Protestantism of Bonamy 
Price, and a theological discussion ensued which waxed 
so warm that Dr. Creighton had to suggest a retreat to 
the drawing-room. When he came up for election at 
Brasenose it was as a non-clerical fellow — I think the 
first who ever was appointed there — that Pater took 
his place in the society. In the next year, in company 
with Mr. Shadwell, he paid his first visit to Italy, and 
at Ravenna, Pisa, Florence, formed those impressions 
of the art of the Renaissance which were so power- 
fully to colour all his own future work as an artist. In 
1858, when he came to Oxford, his sisters had migrated 
to Heidelberg, and here it was his custom to spend the 
long vacation, making no friends among the Germans, 
however, and never, in all those years, troubling him- 
self to learn to speak their language. 



The costume of Walter Pater had been the ordinary 
academic dress of the don of the period, but in May 
1869 he flashed forth at the Private View of the Royal 
Academy in a new top hat and a silk tie of brilliant 
apple-green. This little transformation marked a crisis ; 
he was henceforth no longer a provincial philosopher, 
but a critic linked to London and the modem arts. 
Where he touched the latter was through the Pre- 
raphaelites, especially through the extreme admiration 



254 Critical Kit-Kats 

he had conceived for the works of Mr. Burne-Jones, 
then much talked about, but rarely seen. At no time, 
I think, had he much personal knowledge either of that 
painter or of Rossetti. With Mr. Swinburne he became 
about that date more intimate. The poet was a not 
unfrequent visitor in those years to Pater's college 
rooms. To all young Oxford, then, the name of Mr. 
Swinburne was an enchantment, and there used to be 
envious traditions of an upper window in Brasenose 
Lane thrown open to the summer night, and, welling 
forth from it, a music of verse which first outsang and 
then silenced the nightingales, protracting its harmonies 
until it disconcerted the lark himself at sunrise. 

After this, it is a notable instance of the art of sinking 
to record that I first set eyes on Pater in 1 871, as he 
and Mr. Swinburne were dismounting from a hansom 
cab at Gabriel Rossetti's door in Cheyne Walk. Almost 
unknown to the world, he was already an object of 
respect to me as the author of those " Notes on 
Lionardo," which had seemed to give a new aspect to 
the whole conception of Italian art. In 1872 I was 
presented to him in the studio of William Bell Scott : 
it was not until the early months of 1 874 that I first 
began to visit him at Oxford, and so opened a friend 
ship which was never clouded for a moment in the 
course of more than twenty years. From this point, 
then, although my opportunities of seeing Pater, 
especially in Oxford, were but occasional, I can record 
something from personal knowledge. 

In 1869, removing from Brasenose many of the 



Walter Pater 2C 



:)3 



pretty objects and bric-ci-brac with which he had been 
the first man in Oxford to decorate college rooms, 
Pater furnished a little house in Norham Gardens, 
No. 2 Bradmore Road, his sisters returning from 
Heidelberg to keep house for him. Once settled here. 
Pater blossomed out into considerable sociability, en- 
tertaining and being entertained in the cordial Oxford 
way. He had now a large circle of pleasant acquaint- 
ances ; I cannot remember that he had many intimate 
friends. Besides those whom I have mentioned already, 
I can but recall Mark Pattison, Dr. Mandcll Creighton 
(now Bishop of Peterborough), and Miss Mary Arrwld, 
soon to marry an accomplished young member of 
Pater's own college, Mr. Humphry Ward. To these 
he would doubtless talk, to each in a difTcrent way, of 
the interests most deeply rooted in his heart, " of 
charm, and lucid order, and labour of the file," and to 
a very few London friends also. The rest of the 
w^orld found him affable and acquiescent, already in 
those remote days displaying a little of that Renan 
manner which later on became emphasised, a manner 
which trifled gracefull}' and somewhat mysteriously with 
a conrpanion not entirely in sympathy. 

Pater's relation to the Rector of Lincoln was amus- 
ing. It was at once confiding and suspicious. " Patti- 
son is charming," he used to murmur, " wh.cn he's 
good. Shall we go over and see if he is good this 
afternoon? " But he was worried by a certain wilful- 
ness in the Rector ; he could prove to be so far from 
good, so absolutely naughty. I remember on one 



256 Critical Kit-Kats 

occasion — I think in the autumn of 1875 — when the 
Rector, on a visit at Bradmore Road, had been 
dehcious : he had talked, in his most distinguished 
way, on a dozen rare and exquisite topics. He left, 
begging Pater to come to him next day, and kindly 
extending the invitation to me. Accordingly we went, 
but the charm was broken. A frivolous demon had 
entered into the Rector ; he talked of croquet and of 
petticoats. We went back, sad and silent, to Bradmore 
Road, and, just as we reached home. Pater said, with 
solemn firmness, "What Pattison likes best in the 
world, no doubt, is romping with great girls in the 
gooseberry-bushes ! " 

The vacations in these years were very pleasant to 
Pater ; thc}^ were almost always spent abroad — in 
France, in the company of his sisters. He would walk 
as much as possible, scouring a neighbourhood for 
architectural features, and preserving those impressions 
of travel, which most of us lament to find so fugitive, 
with astonishing exactitude. He was no linguist, and 
French was the only language in which he could even 
make his wants understood. Although so much in 
Germany in his youth, he could speak no German. 
When he was travelling he always left a place, if any 
one staying in the hotel spoke to him. He had no wish 
to be competent in modern languages ; he used to say : 
** Between 3'ou and me and the post, I hate a foreigner," 
and when exotic persons of distinction threatened to 
visit Brasenose, Pater used to disappear until he was 
sure that they had gone. He loved the North of 



Walter Pater 257 



France extremely, and knew it well. He was alwavs 
planning a scries of studies on the great ecclesiastical 
towns of France, yet wrote no more than a couple of 
these — on Amiens and on Vezelay. So eagerly did he 
prosecute these holiday tours, that he habitually over- 
walked himself, thus losing much of the benefit which 
he might otherwise have gained from the only form of 
exercise he ever indulged in. I note, in a letter of 
1877, describing a visit to Azay-le-Rideau, this charac- 
teristic sentence : " We find always great pleasure in 
adding to our experiences of these French places, and 
return always a little tired indeed, but with our minds 
pleasantly full of memories of stained glass, old 
tapestries, and new wild flowers." These excursions 
rarely extended further than the centre of France, but 
once, I think in 1882, Pater went alone to Rome, and 
spent the winter vacation there. He could ill endure 
exciting travel, or too rapid hurrying from one impres- 
sive place to another. His eye absorbed so slowly, 
and his memory retained what he saw so completely, 
that to be shown too much was almost physical pain to 
him, and yet he was always inflicting it upon himself. 

Some time after I knew him first, that entertaining 
skit. The New Republic^ was produced, and achieved 
great popular success. Pater had his niche in this 
gallery of caricatures, under the title of Mr. Rose. It 
has been represented that he suffered violent distress 
from this parody of his style and manner, that it caused 
him to retire from society and to abandon the prosecu- 
tion of literature. Notlung in the world could be 

R 



258 Critical Kit-Kats 

further from the truth. He thought the portrait a 
Httle unscrupulous, and he was discomposed by the 
freedom of some of its details. But he admired the 
cleverness and promise of the book, and it did not 
cause him to alter his mode of life or thought in the 
smallest degree. He was even flattered, for he was an 
author much younger and more obscure than most ot 
those who were satirised, and he was sensible that to 
be thus distinguished was a compHment. What he 
liked less, what did really rufQe him, was the persistence 
with which the newspapers at this time began to attri- 
bute to him all sorts of " aesthetic " follies and extra- 
vagances. He said to me, in 1876: "I wish they 
wouldn't call me * a hedonist ' ; it produces such a bad 
effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." 
And the direct result of all these journalistic mosquito- 
bites was the suppression of the famous ^' Conclusion " 
in the second (1877) edition of his Renaissance. 

The source of his very long silence — for twelve years 
divided his second book from his first — I hardly know, 
unless it be attributed to the painful slowness of his 
methods of composition, and his extreme soHcitude for 
perfection of style. At last, in February, 1885, was 
published his romance of Marius the Epicurean^ the 
work by which, I believe. Pater will pre-eminently be 
known to posterity. In the meantime had appeared, in 
the Fortnightly Review for 1876, several of those Greek 
studies, on Demeter and Persephone, on the Marbles 
of ^gina and the like, which Mr. Shadwell collected 
in a posthumous volume in 1895 ; The Child in the 



Walter Pater 259 



House, too, in its earliest form, belongs to 1878, though 
first published as a book in the summer of 1894. 
The success of Man'tts was as great as that of a 
book so grave and strenuous could be. In 18S7 Pater 
followed it by a series of four Imaginary Portraits, 
studies in philosophic fiction, one of which, " Denys 
I'Auxerrois," displays the peculiarities of his style with 
more concentrated splendour than any other of his 
writings. In 1889 he collected some of his miscellaneous 
critical studies into a volume called ylpprccialions, with 
an Essay on Style. In 1893 he published his highly 
finished college lectures on Plato and Platonisni in a 
volume of rare dignity and humanistic beauty. Finally, 
in the early summer of 1894, The Child in the House 
was issued from the Oxford Press of Mr. Daniel, as a 
precious toy for bibliomaniacs. This list of publica- 
tions practically resumes the events in Pater's life 
through twenty years. 

During that period the household was moved once, 
in 1886, to Kensington, and again, in 1893, back to 
Oxford, where he fitted up a house in St. Giles. But, 
all the while, Pater's real home was in his rooms at 
Brasenose, where he passed a quiet, cloistered, and 
laborious existence, divided between his college duties 
and his books. His later years were comforted by a 
great deal of consideration and afiection from those 
around him ; noiseless, as he was, and in a sense 
unexhilarating, he became increasingly an object of 
respectful admiration to 3'oung Oxford men, whom, on 
his part, he treated with the most courteous indulgence. 



26o Critical Kit-Kats 

Of this generation, one disciple came to proffer a tribute 
of hero-worship, and remained to become an intimate 
friend ; this was the Rev. F. W. Bussell, now Fellow of 
Brasenose, whose tender solicitude did much to render 
the latest of Pater's years agreeable to him. Pater 
acted for some time as dean and tutor of his college, 
entering assiduously into the councils and discipline of 
the society, but he never accepted, if indeed it were 
ever offered, any university office. He shrank from 
all multiplication of responsibihty, from anything which 
should break in upon the sequestered and austere 
simplicity of his life. As time went on, a great change 
came over his relation to religious matters. When I 
had known him first he was a pagan, without any guide 
but that of the personal conscience ; years brought 
gradually with them a greater and greater longing for 
the supporting solace of a creed. His talk, his habits, 
became more and more theological, and it is my private 
conviction that, had he lived a few years longer, he 
would have endeavoured to take orders and a small 
college living in the country. 

Report, which found so much to misrepresent in a 
life so orderly and simple, has erred even as to the 
place and occasion of his death. He was taken ill with 
rheumatic fever in the month of June 1894, being, 
as he remained to the end, not in college, but with his 
sisters in their house in St. Giles. He was recovering, 
and was well enough to be busy upon a study on 
Pascal, which he has left nearly completed, when, in 
consequence of writing too close to an open window, 



Walter PiitcT 261 



pleurisy set in and greatly reduced his strength. 
Again he seemed convalescent, and had left his room, 
without ill-eft'ect, on July 29, when, repeating the ex- 
periment next day, the action of the heart failed, and 
he died, on the staircase of his house, in the arms of 
his sister, at ten o'clock on the morning of Monday, 
July 30, 1894. Had he lived five days longer, he 
would have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was 
buried, in the presence of many of his oldest friends, 
in the beautiful cemetery of St. Giles at Oxford. 



When Pater was first seized with an ambition to 
write, the individuals of his own age with whom he 
came into competition were mainly poets. Those were 
the early days of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, of 
Morris, of Swinburne ; and most of the still younger 
men made their first steps in the field of verse, how- 
ever far they might afterwards diverge from it. Pater, 
in this nest of singing-birds, resolved to be in prose no 
less painstaking, no less elaborate, no less bound by 
rule and art than the poets were. He is to be dis- 
tinguished from those who had so much to say that 
their speech was forced out of them in a torrent, nor 
less from those whose instinct led them to bubble 
forth in periods of a natural artless grace. If we take 
these symbols of a mountain-stream or of a fountain 
for other prose-writers who have won the ear of the 
public with little effort, then for Pater the appropriate 



262 Critical Kit-Kats 

image seems the artesian well, to reach the contents of 
of which, strata of impermeable clay must be laboriously 
bored. It was not that there was any lack of material 
there, nor any doubt about the form it must take when 
it emerged, but that it was so miraculously deep down 
and hard to reach. I have known writers of every 
degree, but never one to whom the act of composition 
was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater. 

In his earlier years the labour of lifting the sentences 
was so terrific that any one with less fortitude would 
have entirely abandoned the effort. I recollect the 
WTiting of the opening chapters of Marius^ and the 
stress that attended it — the intolerable languor and 
fatigue, the fevers and the cold fits, the grey hours of 
lassitude and insomnia, the toil as at a deep petroleum 
well when the oil refuses to flow. With practice, this 
terrific effort grew less. A year or two ago I was re- 
minding him of those old times of storm and stress, and 
he replied, " Ah ! it is much easier now. If I live long 
enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing." 
The public saw the result of the labour in the smooth 
solidity of the result, and could suppose, from the very 
elaboration, that great pains had been taken. How 
much pains, very few indeed can have guessed I 

It may be of interest to record the manner in which 
this most self-conscious and artistic of prose-writers 
proceeded. First of all, another pretty fable must be 
knocked on the head. It has been said, and repeated, 
that Pater composed his best sentences without any 
relation to a context, and wrote them down on little 



Walter Pater 263 



squares of paper, ready to stick them in at appropriate 
and elTective places. This is nonsense ; it is quite 
true that he used such squares of paper, but it was for 
a very different purpose. He read with a box of these 
squares beside him, jotting down on each, very roughly, 
anything in his author which struck his fancy, either 
giving an entire quotation, or indicating a reference, or 
noting a dispo;?ition. He did not begin, I think, any 
serious critical work without surrounding himself b}' 
dozens of these little loose notes. When they were 
not direct references or citations, they were of the 
nature of a mcmon'a tcchnica. Here is an example : 

*' Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., 
belfries, solemn night come in about the birds attracted 
by the Towers." 

Here is another : 

" ? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, 
only after the Fall ? " 

These papers would be placed about him, like the 
pieces of a puzzle, and when the right moment came 
the proper square would serve as a monitor or as a 
guide. 
^ Having prepared his box of little squares, he would 
' begin the labour of actual composition, and so con 
scious was he of the modifications and additions which 
would supervene that he always wrote on ruled paper, 
leaving each alternate line blank. Mr. Austin Dobson 
reminds me that Goldsmith did the same. On this 
broad canvas of alternate lines, then. Pater would 
slowly begin to draw his composition, the cartoon of 



264 Critical Kit-Kats 

what would in time be a finished essay. In the first 
draft the phrase would be a bald one ; in the blank 
alternate line he would at leisure insert fresh descriptive 
or parenthetical clauses, other adjectives, more ex- 
quisitely related adverbs, until the space was filled. 
It might then be supposed that the MS. was complete. 
Far from it I Cancelling sheet by sheet, Pater then 
began to copy out the whole— as before, on alternate 
lines of copy-book pages ; this revise was treated in 
the same way — corrected, enlarged, interleaved, as it 
v/ere, with minuter shades of feeling and more elaborate 
apparatus of parenthesis, i^ 

No wonder that certain disadvantages were attendant 
upon the excessive finish of such a style. It is not 
possible to work in this way, with a cold hammer, and 
yet to avoid a certain deadness and slipperiness of 
surface. Pater's periods, in attaining their long-drawn 
harmony and fulness, were apt to lose vigour. Their 
polish did not quite make up for their languor, for the 
faintness and softness which attended their slow 
manipulation. Verse will bear an almost endless labour 
of the file ; prose, as the freer and more spontaneous 
form, is less happy in subjection to it. " What long 
sentences Plato writes I " Pater says in his Platonism^ 
and no doubt Plato might return the compliment. 
The sentences of the Oxford critic are often too long, 
and they are sometimes broken-backed with havimg 
had to bear too heavy a burden of allusion and illustra- 
tion. His style, however, was his peculiarity. It 
had beautiful qualities, if we have to confess that it 



Walter Pater 265 



had the faults of those qualities. It was highly indivi- 
dual ; it cannot be said that he owed it to any other 
writer, or that at any period of his thirty years of 
literary labour he faltered or swerved from his own 
path. He was to a high degree self-centred. Pater 
did not study his contemporaries ; a year or two ago, 
he told me that he had read scarcely a chapter of Mr. 
Stevenson and not a line of Mr. Kipling. " I feel, from 
what I hear about them," he said, *' that they are 
strong ; they might lead me out of my path. 1 want 
to go on writing in my own way, good or bad. I 
should be afraid to read Kipling, lest he should come 
between me and my page next time I sat down to 
write." It was the excess of a very native and 
genuine modesty. He, too, was strong, had he but 
known it, strong enough to have resisted the magnets 
of contemporary style. Perhaps his own writing 
might have grown a little simpler and a little more 
supple if he had had the fortitude to come down and 
fight among his fellows, 

IV 

Walter Pater was another of those discreet spirits 
who, like Gray, " never speak out." He was cautious, 
reserved, and shy in his relations even with his 
friends ; he seemed to possess no medium through 
which to approach them very closely. An extremely 
affectionate disposition took the place of expansiveness, 
and the young people who in later years gathered 
around him mistook the one for the other. Each found 



266 Critical Kit-Kats 

in Pater what he brought ; each saw in that patient, 
courteous, indulgent mirror a pleasant reflection of 
himself. The inaccessibility of Pater is another of 
those fables which have to be destroyed ; no one was 
less a hermit, no one was more easily amused or 
better pleased to bid a congenial companion welcome. 
He was an assiduous host, a gracious listener; but who 
could tell what was passing behind those half-shut, 
dark-grey eyes, that courteous and gentle mask ? He 
liked the human race, one is inclined to say, liked its 
noise and neighbourhood, if it were neither too loud nor 
too near, but his faith in it was never positive, nor 
would he trust it to read his secret thoughts. 

I have already suggested his likeness to Renan in 
the attitude of his mind. The great Frenchman has 
described, in his autobiography, the tendency which 
led him to refrain from opposition and argument, and 
to bow the head in the conversational house of 
Rimmon. Walter Pater had these concessions, mere 
escapes of the soul from undue pressure, and he had, 
too, quite unconsciously, some of the very tricks of 
speech of Renan — especially the " no doubt " that 
answered to the Frenchman's incessant *'n'en doutez 
pas." With natures hke his, in which the tide of 
physical spirits runs low, in which the vitality is luke- 
warm, the first idea in the presence of anything too 
vivacious is retreat, and the most obvious form of 
social retreat is what we call ** affectation." It is not 
to be denied that, in the old days. Pater, startled by 
strangers, was apt to seem affected : he retreated as 



Walter Patcr 267 



into a fortress, and enclosed himself in a sort of solemn 
effeminacy. It was, at its worst, mild in comparison 
with what the masters of preposterous behaviour have 
since accustomed us to, but it reminded one too much 
of Mr. Rose. It was put on entirely for the benefit of 
strangers, and to his inner circle of friends it seemed 
like a joke. Perhaps in some measure it was a joke ; 
no one could ever quite tell whether Pater's strange 
Hctus was closer to laughter or to tears. 

A nature so enclosed as his, so little capable of 
opening its doors to others, must have some outlet of 
relief. Pater found his outlet in a sort of delicate, 
secret playfulness. There are animals which sit 
all day immovable and humped up among the riot 
of their fellows, and which, when all the rest of the 
menagerie is asleep, steal out upon their slip of green- 
sward and play the wildest pranks in the light of the 
moon. Pater has often reminded me of some such 
armadillo or w^ombat. That childishness which is the 
sign-manual of genius used to come out in the oddest 
way when he was perfectly at home. Those who think 
of him as a solemn pundit of aesthetics may be amazed 
to know that he delighted in very simple and farcical 
spectacles and in the broadest of humour. His favourite 
among modern playwrights was Mr. Pinero, and I shall 
never forget going with him to see The Magistrate^ 
when that piece was originally produced. Not a 
schoolboy in the house was more convulsed with 
laughter, more enchanted at the romping ** business " 
of the play, than the author of Mariiis. He had the 



268 Critical Kit-Kats 

gift, when I knew him first, of inventing little farcical 
dialogues, into which he introduced his contemporaries ; 
in these the Rector of Lincoln generally figured, and 
Pater had a rare art of imitating Pattison's speech and 
peevish intonation. One playful fancy, persisted in so 
long that even close and old friends were deceived by 
it, was the figment of a group of relations — Uncle 
Capsicum and Uncle Guava, Aunt Fancy (who fainted 
when the word '' leg " was mentioned), and Aunt Tart 
(for whom no acceptable present could ever be found). 
These shadowy personages had been talked about for 
so many years that at last, I verily believe. Pater had 
almost persuaded himself of their existence. Perhaps 
these little touches will be thought too trifling to be 
mentioned, but I hold that they were all a part and 
parcel of his complex and shrouded intellectual life, 
and therefore not to be forgotten. 

He had great sweetness and uniformity of temper, 
and almost the only thing that ever ruffled him was a 
reference to an act of vandalism committed at Brasenose 
while he was on the governing body. The college had 
a group, called '* Cain and Abel," cast in lead, a genuine 
work by John of Bologna. For some reason or other 
this was thought inconvenient, and was sold for old 
lead, a somewhat barbarous proceeding. Pater, from 
indolence, or else from indifference to late Itahan sculp- 
ture, did not stir a finger to prevent this desecration, and 
in later years a perfectly unfailing mode of rousing him 
would be to say, artlessly, " Was there not once a group 
by John of Bologna in the college ? " However sunken 



Walter Pater 269 



in reverie, however dreamily detached, Pater would sit 
up in a moment, and say, with great acidity, " It was 
totally devoid of merit, no doubt." 

Pater showed much tact and good sense in his attitude 
towards the college life. He lectured rarely, I believe, 
in later years ; in the old days he was an assiduous 
tutor. His temperament, it is true, sometimes made it 
difficult to work with him. On one occasion, at the 
examination for scholarships, he undertook to look over 
the English essays ; when the examiners met to compare 
marks. Pater had none. He explained, with languor, 
" They did not much impress me." As something had 
to be done, he was asked to endeavour to recall such 
impressions as he had formed ; to stimulate his memory, 
the names were read out in alphabetical order. Pater 
shook his head mournfully as each was pronounced, 
murmuring dreamily, ** I do not recall him," " He did 
not strike me," and so on. At last the reader came to 
the name of Sanctuary, on which Pater's face lit up, and 
he said, " Yes ; I remember ; I liked his name." 

My friend, Dr. Henry Jackson, gives me an anecdote 
which illustrates a more practical side to his character. 
In 1870, having just begun to lecture at Trinity, our 
Cambridge Platonist found himself seated next Pater at 
dinner in Brasenose. He said to him : " I believe you 
lecture constantly on The Republic. How do you get 
through it in time ? It seems as though lecturing three 
times a week for three terms, it would be impossible to 
deal adequately within a year with all the problems and 
the fallacies." " Oh ! " said Pater, " I always begin by 



270 Critical Kit-Kats 

telling them that Socrates is not such a fool as he seems, 
and we get through nicely in two terms." He grew 
more and more inclined to take an indulgent view of the 
young people. A year or two ago, I remember his say- 
ing, when somebody asked him whether the horse-play 
of the undergraduates did not disturb him, '* Oh I no ; 
I rather enjoy it. They are like playful young tigers, 
that have been fed." He was not a " progressive " ; 
our friend the Bishop of Peterborough recalls a serious 
discussion in common-room at Brasenose, on the burn- 
ing subject of university reform. Pater interposed in 
the thick of the fray with the somewhat disconcerting 
remark, " I do not know what your object is. At present 
the undergraduate is a child of nature ; he grows up 
like a wild rose in a country lane ; you want to turn him 
into a turnip, rob him of all grace, and plant him out in 
rows." And his remark, concerning bonfires in the quad, 
that they lighted up the spire of St. Mary's so beauti- 
fully, will long be remembered. 

The perennial conflict in his members, between his 
exquisite instinct for corporeal beauty on the one hand 
and his tendency to ecclesiastical symbol and theological 
dogma on the other, is the secret, I think, of what made 
the character of Pater so difficult for others to elucidate, 
in some measure also so painful and confusing for him- 
self. He was not all for Apollo, nor all for Christ, but 
each deity swayed in him, and neither had that perfect 
homage that brings peace behind it. As Alphonse 
Daudet says of some thinker, *' Son cerveau etait una 
cathedrale desaffectee," and when he tried, as he bade us 



Walter Pater 271 



try, " to burn jilvvays with the hard, gcm-Hkc flame " of 
aesthetic observation, the flame of another altar mingled 
with the fire and darkened it. Not easily or surely 
shall we divine the workings of a brain and a conscience 
scarcely less complex, less fantastic, less enigmatical, 
than the face of Mona Lisa herself. Pater, as a human 
being, illustrated by no letters, by no diaries, by no im- 
pulsive unburdenings of himself to associates, will grow 
more and more shadowy. But it has seemed well to 
preserve, while still they are attainable, some of the 
external facts about a writer whose polished and con- 
centrated work has already become part of the classic 
literature of England, and who will be remembered 
among the writers of this age when all but a few are 
forgotten. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

PERSONAL MEMORIES 

In setting down my recollections of Louis Stevenson, 
I desire to confine the record to what I have myself 
known and seen. His writings will be mentioned only 
in so far as I heard them planned and discussed. Of 
his career and character I shall not attempt to give a 
complete outline ; all I purpose to do is to present those 
sides of them which came under my personal notice. 
The larger portrait it will be his privilege to prepare 
who was the closest and the most responsible of all 
Stevenson's friends ; and it is only while we wait for 
Mr. Sidney Colvin's biography that these imperfect 
sketches can retain their value. The most that can be 
hoped for them is that they may secure a niche in his 
gallery. And now, pen in hand, I pause to think how 
I can render in words a faint impression of the most 
inspiriting, the most fascinating human being that I 
have known. 



It is nearly a quarter of a century since I first saw 
Stevenson. In the autumn of 1870, in company with a 
former schoolfellow, I was in the Hebrides. We had 



276 Critical Kit-Kats 

been wandering in the Long Island, as they name the 
outer archipelago, and our steamer, returning, called at 
Skye. At the pier of Portree, I think, a company came on 
board — "people of importance in their day," Edinburgh 
acquaintances, I suppose, who had accidentally met in 
Skye on various errands. At all events, they invaded 
our modest vessel with a loud sound of talk. Professor 
Blackie was among them, a famous figure that calls for 
no description ; and a voluble, shaggy man, clad in 
homespun, with spectacles forward upon nose, who, it 
was whispered to us, was Mr. Sam Bough, the Scottish 
Academician, a water-colour painter of some repute, 
who was to die in 1878. There were also several 
engineers of prominence. At the tail of this chatty, 
jesting little crowd of invaders came a youth of about 
my own age, whose appearance, for some mysterious 
reason, instantly attracted me. He was tall, preternatur- 
ally lean, with longish hair, and as restless and questing 
as a spaniel. The party from Portree fairly took 
possession of us; at meals they crowded around the 
captain, and we common tourists sat silent, below the 
salt. The stories of Blackie and Sam Bough were 
resonant. Meanwhile, I knew not why, I watched the 
plain, pale lad who took the lowest place in this pri- 
vileged company. 

The summer of 1 870 remains in the memory of 
western Scotland as one of incomparable splendour. 
Our voyage, especially as evening drew on, was like an 
emperor's progress. We stayed on deck till the latest 
moment possible, and I occasionally watched the lean 



Robert Louis Stevenson 277 

youth, busy and serviceable, with some of the little 
tricks with which we were later on to grow familiar — 
the advance with hand on hip, the sidcwise bending of 
the head to listen. Meanwhile darkness overtook us, 
a wonderful halo of moonlight swam up over Glenelg, 
the indigo of the peaks of the Cuchullins faded into the 
general blue night. I went below, but was presently 
aware of some change of course, and then of an un- 
expected stoppage. I tore on deck, and found that we 
had left our track among the islands, and had steamed 
up a narrow and unvisited fiord of the mainland — I 
think Loch Nevis. The sight was curious and be- 
wildering. We lay in a gorge of blackness, with only 
a strip of the blue moonlit sky overhead ; in the dark 
a few lanterns jumped about the shore, carried by 
agitated but unseen and soundless persons. As I 
leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, 
and he explained to me that we had come up this loch 
to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants 
driven from their homes in the interests of a deer-forest. 
As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the 
vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their 
hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and 
suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from 
them a v;ild kerning and wailing, reverberated by the 
cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour 
infinitely poignant. When I came on deck next morn- 
ing, m}' unnamed friend was gone. He had put off with 
the engineers to visit some remote lighthouse of the 
Hebrides. 



278 Critical Kit-Kats 

Tkis early glimpse of Stevenson is a delightful 
memory to me. When we met next, not only did I 
instantly recall him, but, what was stranger, he remem- 
bered me. This voyage in the Clansman was often 
mentioned between us, and it has received for me a 
sort of consecration from the fact that in the very last 
letter that Louis wrote, finished on the day of his 
death, he made a reference to it. 



In the very touching " Recollections " which our 
friend Mr. Andrew Lang has published, he says : " I 
shall not deny that my first impression [of Stevenson] 
was not wholly favourable." I remember, too, that 
John Addington Symonds was not pleased at first. It 
only shows how different are our moods. I must con- 
fess that in my case the invading army simply walked 
up and took the fort by storm. It was in 1877, or late 
in 1876, that I was presented to Stevenson, at the old 
Savile Club, by Mr. Sidney Colvin, who thereupon left 
us to our devices. We went downstairs and lunched 
together, and then we adjourned to the smoking-room. 
As twilight came on I tore myself away, but Stevenson 
walked with me across Hyde Park, and nearly to my 
house. He had an engagement, and so had I, but I 
walked a mile or two back with him. The fountains of 
talk had been unsealed, and they drowned the conven- 
tions. I came home dazzled with my new friend, 
saying, as Constance does of Arthur, ^' Was ever such 



Robert Louis Stevenson 279 

a gracious creature born ? " That impression of in- 
effable mental charm was formed at the first moment of 
acquaintance, and it never lessened or became modified. 
Stevenson's rapidity in the sympathetic interchange of 
ideas was, doubtless, the source of it. He has been 
described as an " egotist," but I challenge the descrip- 
tion. If ever there was an altruist, it was Louis 
Stevenson ; he seemed to feign an interest in himself 
merely to stimulate you to be liberal in your con- 
fidences.* 

Those who have written about him from later im- 
pressions than those of which I speak seem to me to 
give insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. 
It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A 
childlike mirth leaped and danced in him ; he seemed 
to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling 
with quips and jests ; his inherent earnestness or 
passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by 
jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual 
castles in the sand, a wave of humour was certain to 
sweep in and destroy it. I cannot, for the life of me, 
recall any of his jokes ; and written down in cold blood, 
they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit 
so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon 

• This continued to be his characteristic to the last. Thus he described 
an interview he had in Sydney with some man formerly connected with the 
" black-biniing " trade, by saying: "He was very shy at first, and it was 
not till I told him of a good many of my escapades that I could get him to 
thaw, and then he poured it all out. I have always found that the best way 
of getting people to be confidential." 



28o Critical Kit-Kats 

» ' • — 

life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving mood should 
not be forgotten, because later on it was partly, but I 
think never wholly, quenched by ill health, responsi- 
bility, and the advance of years. He was often, in the 
old days, excessively and delightfully silly — silly with 
the silliness of an inspired schoolboy ; and I am afraid 
that our laughter sometimes sounded ill in the ears of 
age. 

A pathos was given to his gaiety by the fragility of 
his health. He was never well, all the years I knew 
him; and we looked upon his Hfe as hanging by the 
frailest tenure. As he never complained or maundered, 
this, no doubt — though we were not aware of it — added 
to the charm of his presence. He was so bright and 
keen and witty, and any week he might die. No one, 
certainly, conceived it possible that he could reach his 
forty-fifth year. In 1879 his health visibly began to 
run lower, and he used to bury himself in lonely Scotch 
and French places, " tinkering himself with solitude," 
as he used to say. 

My experience of Stevenson during these first years 
was confined to London, upon which he would make 
sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks, 
and melting into air again. He was much at my house; 
and it must be told that my wife and I, as young 
married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too 
large for our slender means immediately to furnish. 
The one person who thoroughly approved of our great, 
bare, absurd drawing-room was Louis, who very 
earnestly dealt with us on the immorality of chairs and 



Robert Louis Stevenson 281 

tables, and desired us to sit always, as he delighted to 
sit, upon hassocks on the floor. Nevertheless, as 
arm-chairs and settees straggled into existence, he 
handsomely consented to use them, although never in 
the usual way, but with his legs thrown sidewise over 
the arms of them, or the head of a sofa treated as a 
perch. In particular, a certain shelf, with cupboards 
below, attached to a bookcase, is worn with the person 
of Stevenson, who would spend half an evening while 
passionately discussing some great question of morality 
or literature, leaping sidewise in a seated posture to 
the length of this shelf, and then back again. He was 
eminently peripatetic, too, and never better company 
than walking in the street, this exercise seeming to 
inflame his fancy. But his most habitual dwelling- 
place in the London of those days was the Savile Club, 
then lodged in an inconvenient but very friendly house 
in Savile Row. Louis pervaded the club ; he was its 
most affable and chatty member ; and he lifted it, by 
the ingenuity of his incessant dialectic, to the level of a 
sort of humorous Academe or Mouseion. 

At this time he must not be thought of as a success- 
ful author. A very few of us were convinced of his 
genius ; but with the exception of Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
nobody of editorial status was sure of it. I remember 
the publication of ^« Inland Voyage in 1878, and the 
inability of the critics and the public to see anything 
unusual in it. 

Stevenson was not without a good deal of innocent 
oddity in his dress. When I try to conjure up his 



282 Critical Kit-Kats 

figure, I can see only a slight, lean lad, in a suit of blue 
sea-cloth, a black shirt, and a wisp of yellow carpet 
that did duty for a necktie. This was long his attire, 
persevered in to the anguish of his more conventional 
acquaintances. I have a ludicrous memory of going, 
in 1878, to buy him a new hat, in company with Mr. 
Lang, the thing then upon his head having lost the 
semblance of a human article of dress. Aided by a 
very civil shopm.an, we suggested several hats and caps, 
and Louis at first seemed interested ; but having pre- 
sently hit upon one which appeared to us pleasing and 
decorous, we turned for a moment to inquire the price. 
We turned back, and found that Louis had fled, the 
idea of parting with the shapeless object having proved 
,too painful to be entertained. By the way, Mr. Lang 
will pardon me if I tell, in exacter detail, a story of 
his. It was immediately after the adventure with the 
hat that, not having quite enough money to take him 
from London to Edinburgh, third class, he proposed to 
the railway clerk to throw in a copy of Mr. Swinburne's 
Queen-Mother and Rosamond. The offer was refused 
with scorn, although the book was of the first edition, 
and even then worth more than the cost of a whole 
ticket. 

Stevenson's pity was a very marked quality, and it 
extended to beggars, which is, I think, to go too far. 
His optimism, however, suffered a rude shock in South 
Audley Street one summer afternoon. We met a stal- 
wart beggar, whom I refused to aid. Louis, however, 
wavered, and finally handed him sixpence. The man 



Robert Louis Stevenson 283 

pocketed the coin, forbore to thank his benefactor, but, 
fixing his eye on me, said, in a loud voice, " And what 
is the other Httle gentleman going to give me?" " In 
future," said Louis, as we strode coldly on, " / shall be 
* the other little gentleman.' " 

In those early days he suffered many indignities on 
account of his extreme youthfulness of appearance and 
absence of self-assertion. He was at Inverness — being 
five or six and twenty at the time — and had taken a 
room in a hotel. Coming back about dinner-time, he 
asked the hour of table d'hote, whereupon the landlady 
said, in a motherly way : " Oh, I knew you wouldn't 
like to sit in there among the grown-up people, so I've 
had a place put for you in the bar." There was a frolic 
at the Royal Hotel, Bathgate, in the summer of 1879. 
Louis was lunching alone, and the maid, considering 
him a negligible quantity, came and leaned out of the 
window. This outrage on the proprieties was so sting- 
ing that Louis at length made free to ask her, with irony, 
what she was doing there. *' I'm looking for my lad," 
she replied. " Is that he ? " asked Stevenson, with 
keener sarcasm. ^' Weel, I've been lookin' for him a' 
my life, and I've never seen him yet," was the response. 
Louis was disarmed at once, and wrote her on the spot 
some beautiful verses in the vernacular. " They're no 
bad for a beginner," she was kind enough to say when 
she had read them. 

The year 1879 was a dark one in the life of Louis. 
He had formed a conviction that it was his duty to go 
out to the extreme west of the United States, while his 



284 Critical Kit-Kats 

family and the inner circle of his frinds were equally- 
certain that it was neither needful nor expedient that he 
should make this journey. As it turned out, they were 
wrong, and he was right ; but in the circumstances their 
opinion seemed the only correct one. His health was 
particularly bad, and he was ordered, not West, but 
South. The expedition, which he has partly described 
in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains^ was 
taken, therefore, in violent opposition to all those whom 
he left in England and Scotland ; and this accounts for 
the mode in which it was taken. He did not choose to 
ask for money to be spent in going to California, and it 
was hoped that the withdrawal of supplies would make 
the voyage impossible. But Louis, bringing to the front 
a streak of iron obstinacy which lay hidden somewhere 
in his gentle nature, scraped together enough to secure 
him a steerage passage across the Atlantic. 

The day before he started he spent with my wife and 
me — a day of stormy agitation, an April day of rain- 
clouds and sunshine ; for it was not in Louis to remain 
long in any mood. I seem to see him now, pacing the 
room, a cigarette spinning in his wasted fingers. To the 
last we were trying to dissuade him from what seemed to 
us the maddest of enterprises. He was so ill that I did 
not like to leave him, and at night — it was midsummer 
weather — we walked down into town together. We 
were by this time, I suppose, in a pretty hysterical state 
of mind, and as we went through Berkeley Square, in 
mournful discussion of the future, Louis suddenly pro- 
posed that we should visit the so-called " Haunted 



Robert Louis Stevenson 285 

House," which then occupied the newspapers. The 
square was quiet in the decency of a Sunday evening. 
We found the house, and one of us boldly knocked at 
the door. There was no answer and no sound, and we 
jeered upon the door-step ; but suddenly we were both 
aware of a pale face — a phantasm in the dusk — gazing 
down upon us from a surprising height. It was the 
caretaker, I suppose, mounted upon a flight of steps : 
but terror gripped us at the heart, and we fled with foot- 
steps as precipitate as those of schoolboys caught in an 
orchard. I think that ghostly face in Berkeley Square 
must have been Louis's latest European impression for 
many months. 

m 

All the world now knows, through the two books 
which I have named, what immediately happened. 
Presently letters began to arrive, and in one from Mon- 
terey, written early in October 1879, he told me of 
what was probably the nearest approach of death that 
ever came until the end, fifteen years later. I do not 
think it is generally known, even in the inner circle of 
his friends, that in September of that year he w^as 
violently ill, alone, at an Angora-goat ranch in the 
Santa Lucia Mountains. " I scarcely slept or ate or 
thought for four days," he said. '* Two nights I lay 
out under a tree, in a sort of stupor, doing nothing but 
fetch water for myself and horse, light a fire and make 
coffee, and all night awake hearing the goat-bells ringing 
and the tree-toads singing, when each new noise was 



286 Critical Kit-Kats 

enough to set me mad." Then an old frontiersman, a 
mighty hunter of bears, came round, and tenderly 
nursed him through his attack. ''By all rule this 
should have been my death ; but after a while my spirit 
got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked 
and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis 
and success." 

Late in the winter of 1879, with renewed happiness 
and calm of life, and also under the spur of a need of 
money, he wrote with much assiduity. Among other 
things, he composed at Monterey the earliest of his 
novels, a book called A Vendetta in the TVest, the manu- 
script of which seems to have disappeared. Perhaps 
we need not regret it ; for, so he declared to me, " It 
was about as bad as Ouida, but not quite, for it was 
not so eloquent." He had made a great mystery of his 
whereabouts ; indeed, for several months no one was to 
know what had become of him, and his letters were to 
be considered secret. At length, in writing from Mon- 
terey, on November 15, 1879, he removed the embargo : 
" That I am in California ma}^ now be published to the 
brethren." In the summer of the next year, after a 
winter of very serious ill health, during which more 
than once he seemed on the brink of a galloping con- 
sumption, he returned to England. He had married in 
California a charming lady whom we all soon learned 
to regard as the most appropriate and helpful companion 
that Louis could possibly have secured. On October 8, 
1880 — a memorable day — he made his first appearance 
in London since his American exile. A post-card from 



Robert Louis Stevenson 287 

Edinburgh had suninioncd me to "appoint with an 
appointment" certain particular friends; "and let us 
once again," Louis wrote, " lunch together in the Sa\ile 
Halls." Mr. Lang and Mr. Walter Pollock, and, I 
think, Mr. Ilenle}', graced the occasion, and the club 
cellar produced a bottle of Chambertin of quite uncom- 
mon merit. Louis, I may explain, had a peculiar pas- 
sion for Burgundy, which he esteemed the wine of 
highest possibilities in the whole Bacchic order; and I 
have often known him descant on a Pommard or a 
Montraclict in terms so exquisite that the listeners 
could scarcely taste the wine itself. 

Davos-Platz was now prescribed for the rickety lungs; 
and late in that year Louis and his wife took up their 
abode there, at the H6tcl Buol, he carrying with him a 
note from me recommending him to the care of John 
Addington Symonds. Not at first, but presently and 
on the whole, these two men, so singular in their gene- 
ration, so unique and so unlike, "hit it off," as people 
say, and were an intellectual solace to each other ; but 
their real friendship did not begin till a later year. I 
remember Stevenson saying to me next spring that to 
be much with Symonds was to " adventure in a 
thornwood." It w^as at Davos, this w^interof 18S0, that 
Stevenson took up the study of Hazlitt, having found a 
publisher who w\is willing to bring out a critical and 
biographical memoir. This scheme occupied a great 
part of Louis's attention, but was eventuall}^ dropped ; 
for the further he progressed in the investigation of 
Hazlitt's character the less he liked it, and the squalid 



288 Critical Kit-Kats 

Ui)er Amoris gave the coup de grace. He did not know 
what he would be at. His vocation was not yet ap- 
parent to him. He talked of writing on craniology and 
the botany of the Alps. The unwritten books of 
Stevenson will one day attract the scholiast, who will 
endeavour, perhaps, to reconstruct them from the refer- 
ences to them in his correspondence. It may, there- 
fore, be permissible to record here that he was long 
proposing to write a life of the Duke of Wellington, for 
which he made some considerable collections. This was 
even advertised as *' in preparation," on several occa- 
sions, from 1885 until 1887, but was ultimately aban- 
doned. I remember his telling me that he intended to 
give emphasis to the "humour" of Wellington. 

In June, 1881, we saw him again; but he passed 
very rapidly through London to a cottage at Pitlochry 
in Perthshire. He had lost his hold on town. " Lon- 
don," he wrote me, " now chiefly means to me Colvin 
and Henley, Leslie Stephen and you." He was now 
coursing a fresh literary hare, and set Mr. Austin 
Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury, and me busily hunting out 
facts about Jean Cavalier, the romantic eighteenth- 
century adventurer, whose life he fancied that he would 
write. His thoughts had recurred, in fact, to Scottish 
history ; and he suddenly determined to do what seemed 
rather a mad thing — namely, to stand for the Edin- 
burgh professorship of history, then just vacant. We 
were all whipped up for testimonials, and a little pam- 
phlet exists, in a pearl-grey cover — the despair of 
bibliophiles — in which he and a strange assortment of 



Robert Louis Stc\ cnson 289 

his friends set forth his claims. These required nimble 
treatment, since, to put it plainly, it was impossible to 
say that he had any. His appeal was treated by the 
advocates, who were the electing body, with scant con- 
sideration, and some worthy gentleman was elected. 
The round Louis was well out of such a square hole as 
a chair in a university. 

But something better was at hand. It was now, and 
in the peace of the Highlands, that Louis set out to 
become a popular writer. The fine art of "booming" 
had not then been introduced, nor the race of those 
who week by week discover coveys of fresh geniuses. 
Although Stevenson, in a sporadic way, had written 
much that was delightful, and that will last, he was yet 
— now at the close of his thirty-first year — by no means 
successful. The income he made b}^ his pen was still 
ridiculously small ; and Mr. John Morley, amazing as 
it sounds to-day, had just refused to give him a book to 
write in the English Men of Letters series, on the ground 
of his obscurity as an author. All this was to be changed, 
and the book that v/as to do it was even now upon the 
stocks. In August the Stevensons moved to a house 
in Braemar — a place, as Louis said, "patronised by 
the ro3'alty of the Sister Kingdoms — Victoria and 
the Cairngorms, sir, honouring that country-side by 
their conjunct presence." Hither I was invited, and 
here I paid an ever memorable visit. The house, 
as Louis was careful to instruct me, was entitled 
" The Cottage, late the late Miss McGregor's, Castle- 
ton of Braemar " ; and thus I obediently addressed my 

T 



290 Critical Kit-Kats 

letters until Louis remarked that " the reference to a 
deceased Highland lady, tending as it does to foster 
unavailing sorrow, may be with advantage omitted from 
the address." 

To the Cottage, therefore, heedless of the manes of 
the late Miss McGregor, I proceeded in the most violent 
storm of hail and rain that even Aberdeenshire can 
produce in August, and found Louis as frail as a ghost, 
indeed, but better than I expected. He had adopted a 
trick of stretching his thin limbs over the back of a wicker 
sofa, which gave him an extraordinary resemblance to 
that quaint insect, the praying mantis ; but it was a 
mercy to find him out of bed at all. Among the many 
attractions of the Cottage, the presence of Mr. Thomas 
Stevenson — Louis's father — must not be omitted. He 
was then a singularly charming and vigorous personality, 
indignantly hovering at the borders of old age (" Sixty- 
three, sir, this year ; and, deuce take it ! am I to be 
called ' an old gentleman ' by a cab-driver in the streets 
of Aberdeen ? ") and, to my gratitude and delight, my 
companion in long morning walks. The detestable 
weather presently brought all the other members of the 
household to their beds, and Louis in particular became 
a wreck. However, it was a wreck that floated every 
day at nightfall ; for at the worst he was able to come 
down-stairs to dinner and spend the evening with us. 

We passed the days with regularity. After break- 
fast I went to Louis's bedroom, where he sat up in bed, 
with dark, flashing eyes and ruffled hair, and we played 
chess on the coverlet. Not a word passed, for he was 



Robert Louis Stevenson 291 

strictly forbidden to speak in the early part of the day. 
As soon as he felt tired — often in the middle of a game 
— he would rap with peremptory knuckles on the board 
as a signal to stop, and then Mrs. Stevenson or I would 
arrange his writing materials on the bed. Then I would 
see no more of him till dinner-time, when he would ap- 
pear, smiling and voluble, the horrid bar of speechless- 
ness having been let down. Then every night, after 
dinner, he would read us what he had written during 
the day. I find in a note to my wife, dated Septem- 
ber 3, 1 88 1 : *' Louis has been writing, all the time I 
have been here, a novel of pirates and hidden trea- 
sure, in the highest degree exciting. He reads it to us 
every night, chapter by chapter." This, of course, was 
Treasure Island^ about the composition of which, long 
afterward, in Samoa, he wrote an account in some parts 
of which I think that his memory played him false. I 
look back to no keener intellectual pleasure than those 
cold nights at Braemar, with the sleet howling outside, 
and Louis reading his budding romance by the lamp- 
light, emphasising the purpler passages with lifted voice 
and gesticulating finger. 

IV 

Hardly had I left the Cottage than the harsh and 
damp climate of Aberdeenshire was felt to be rapidly 
destroying Louis, and he and his wife fled for Davos. 
Before the end of October the}' were ensconced there in 
a fairly comfortable chalet. Here Louis and his step- 



292 Critical Kit-Kats 

son amused themselves by setting up a hand-press, 
which Mr. Osbourne worked, and for which Louis pro- 
vided the literary material. Four or five laborious little 
publications were put forth, some of them illustrated by 
the daring hand of Stevenson himself. He complained 
to me that Mr. Osbourne was a very ungenerous pub- 
lisher — '^ one penny a cut, and one halfpenny a set of 
verses ! What do you say to that for Grub Street ? " 
These little diversions were brought to a close by the 
printer-publisher breaking, at one fell swoop, the 
press and his own finger. The little " Davos Press " 
issues now fetch extravagant prices, which would have 
filled author and printer with amazement. About this 
time Louis and I had a good deal of correspondence 
about a work which he had proposed that we should 
undertake in collaboration — a retelling, in choice literary 
form, of the most picturesque murder cases of the last 
hundred years. We were to visit the scenes of these 
crimes, and turn over the evidence. The great thing, 
Louis said, was not to begin to write until we were 
thoroughly alarmed. " These things must be done, 
my boy, under the very shudder of the goose-flesh." 
We were to begin with the " Story of the Red Barn," 
which indeed is a tale pre-eminently worthy to be 
retold by Stevenson. But the scheme never came off, 
and is another of the dead leaves in his Vallombrosa. 

We saw him in London again, for a few days, in 
October 1882 ; but this was a melancholy period. For. 
eight months at the close of that year and the beginning 
of 1883 he was capable of no mental exertion. He was 



Robert Louis Stevenson 293 

in the depths of lan:;uor, and in nightly apprehension 
of a fresh attack. He slept excessively, and gave 
humorous accounts of the drowsiness that hung upon 
him, addressing his notes as '* from the Arms of Por- 
pus " (Morpheus) and " at the Sign of the Poppy." 
No climate seemed to relieve him, and so, in the autumn 
of 1882, a bold experiment was tried. As the snows of 
Davos were of no avail, the hot, damp airs of Hy^res 
should be essayed. I am inclined to dwell in some 
fulness on the year he spent at Ilyeres, because, 
curiously enough, it was not so much as mentioned, 
to my knowledge, by any of tlie writers of obituary 
notices at Stevenson's death. It takes, neverthe- 
less, a prominent place in his life's history, for his 
removal thither marked a sudden and brilliant, though 
only temporary, revival in his health and spirits. 
Some of his best work, too, was written at H3'eres, and 
one might say that fame first found him in this warm 
corner of southern France. 

The house at Ilyeres was called " La Solitude." It 
stood in a paradise of roses and aloes, fig-marigolds 
and olives. It had delectable and even, so Louis de- 
clared, " sub-celestial " views over a plain bounded by 
*' certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, as severe as 
Zeus " ; and at first the hot mistral, which blew and 
burned where it blew, seemed the only drawback. 
Not a few of the best poems in the Underwoods reflect 
the ecstasy of convalescence under the sides and per- 
fumes of La Solitude. By the summer Louis could 
report " good health of a radiant order:" It was while 



294 Critical Kit-Kats 

he was at Hyeres that Stevenson first directly addressed 
an American audience, and I may record that, in Sep- 
tember 1883, h^ told me to '' beg Gilder your prettiest 
for a gentleman in pecuniary sloughs." Mr. Gilder was 
quite alive to the importance of securing such a contri- 
butor, although when the Amateur Emigrant had entered 
the office of The Century Magazine in 1 879 he had been 
very civilly but coldly shown the door. (I must be 
allowed to tease my good friends in Union Square by 
recording that fact !) Mr. Gilder asked for fiction, but 
received instead The Silverado Squatters^ which duly 
appeared in the magazine. 

It was also arranged that Stevenson should make an 
ascent of the Rhone for The Century, and Mr. Joseph 
Pennell was to accompany him to make sketches for the 
magazine. But Stevenson's health failed again : the 
sudden death of a very dear old friend was a painful 
shock to him, and the winter of that year was not pro- 
pitious. Abruptly, however, in January 1884, another 
crisis came. He went to Nice, where he was thought 
to be dying. He saw no letters ; all his business was 
kindly taken charge of by Mr. Henley ; and again, for 
a long time, he passed beneath the penumbra of steady 
languor and infirmity. When it is known how con- 
stantly he suffered, how brief and flickering were the 
intervals of comparative health, it cannot but add to the 
impression of his radiant fortitude through all these 
trials, and of his persistent employment of all his lucid 
moments. It was pitiful, and yet at the same time 
very inspiriting, to see a creature so feeble and so ill 



Robert Louis Stevenson 295 

equipped for the struggle bear himself so smilingly and 
so manfully through all his afflictions. There can he 
no doubt, however, that this latest breakdown vitally 
aflcctcd his spirits. He was never, after this, quite 
the gay cliild of genius that he had previously been. 
Something of a graver cast became natural to his 
thoughts; he had seen Death in the cave. And now 
for the first time we traced a new note in his writings 
— the note of " Pulvis et Umbra." 

After 1S83 my personal memories of Stevenson be- 
come very casual. In November 1884, he was settled 
at Bournemouth, in a villa called Bonaltie Towers, and 
there he stayed until, in March 1885, he took a house 
of his own, which, in pious memory of his grandfather, 
he named Skerryvore. In the preceding winter, when 
I was going to America to lecture, he was particularly 
anxious that 1 should lay at the feet of Mr. Frank R. 
Stockton his homage, couched in the following lines : 

My Stockton if I failed to like. 

It were a sheer depravity ; 
For I went down with the '* Thomas Hy\e^ 

jlnd up with the " Negative Gravity." 

He adored these tales of Mr. Stockton's, a taste which 
must be shared by all good men. To my constant 
sorrow, I was never able to go to Bournemouth during 
the years he lived there. It has been described to me, 
by those who were more fortunate, as a pleasure that 
was apt to tantalize and evade the visitor, so constantly 



296 Critical Kit-Kats 

was the invalid unable, at the last, to see the friend 
who had travelled a hundred miles to speak with him. 
It was therefore during his visits to London, infrequent 
as these were, that we saw him at his best, for these 
were made at moments of unusual recovery. He 
generally lodged at what he called the " Monument," this 
being his title for Mr. Colvin's house, a wing of the 
vast structure of the British Museum. I recall an 
occasion on which Louis dined with us (March 1886), 
because of the startling interest in the art of strategy 
which he had developed — an interest which delayed the 
meal with arrangements of serried bottles counter- 
scarped and lines of cruets drawn up on horseback 
ready to charge. So infectious was his enthusiasm 
that we forgot our hunger, and hung over the em- 
battled table-cloth, easily persuaded to agree with him 
that neither poetry nor the plastic arts could compete 
for a moment with ^' the finished conduct, sir, of a large 
body of men in face of the enemy." 

It was a little later that he took up the practice of 
modelling clay figures as he sat up in bed. Some of 
these compositions — which needed, perhaps, his elo- 
quent commentary to convey their full effect to the 
spectator — were not without a measure of skill of de- 
sign. I recollect his saying, with extreme gravity, " I 
am in sculpture what Mr. Watts is in painting. We 
are both of us pre-occupied with moral and abstract 
ideas." I wonder whether any one has preserved 
specimens of these allegorical groups of clay. 

The last time I had the happiness of seeing Steven- 



Robert Louis Stevenson 297 

son was on Sunday, August 21, 1887. He had been 
brought up from Bournemouth the day before in a 
wretched condition of health, and was lodged in a 
private hotel in Finsbury Circus, in the City, ready to 
be easily moved to a steamer in the Thames on the 
morrow. I was warned, in a note, of his passage 
through town, and of the uncertainty whether he could 
be seen. On the chance, I went over early on the 
2 1 St, and, very happily for me, he had had a fair 
night, and could see me for an hour or two. No one 
else but Mrs. Stevenson was with him. His position 
was one which might have daunted any man's spirit, 
doomed to exile, in miserable health, starting vaguely 
across the Atlantic, with all his domestic interests 
rooted up, and with no notion where, or if at all, they 
should be replanted. If ever a man of imagination 
could be excused for repining, it was now. 

But Louis showed no white feather. He was radiantly 
humorous and romantic. It was church time, and there 
was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could 
not do, because there could be found no other reputable 
witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. 
This set Louis off on a splendid dream of romance. 
"This," he said, "is the way in which our valuable 
city hotels — packed, doubtless, with rich objects of 
jewellery — are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some 
bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbata- 
rianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking 
the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and 
twelve. One hotel a week would suffice to enable such 



298 Critical Kit-Kats 

a man to retire into private life within the space of a 
year. A mask might, perhaps, be worn for the mere 
fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but 
no real disguise would be needful to an enterprise 
that would require nothing but a brave heart and a 
careful study of the City Postal Directory." He 
spoke of the matter with so much fire and gallantry 
that I blushed for the youth of England and its lack 
of manly enterprise. No one ever could describe 
preposterous conduct with such a convincing air as 
Louis could. Common sense was positively humbled 
in his presence. 

The volume of his poems called Underwoods had just 
appeared, and he inscribed a copy of it to me in the 
words " at Todgers', as ever was, chez TodgerSy Peck- 
sniff street." The only new book he seemed to wish 
to carry away with him was Mr. Hardy's beautiful 
romance. The WoodlanderSy which we had to scour 
London that Sunday afternoon to get hold of. In the 
evening Mr. Colvin and I each returned to " Todgers' " 
with the three volumes, borrowed or stolen somewhere, 
and wrapped up for the voyage next day. And so the 
following morning, in an extraordinary vessel called the 
Ludgate Hill — as though in compliment to Mr. Stock- 
ton's genius — and carrying, besides the Stevensons, 
a cargo of stallions and monkeys, Mr. and Mrs. Steven- 
son and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne steamed down the Thames 
in search of health across the Atlantic and the Pacific. 
The horses, Louis declared, protruded their noses in an 
unmannerly way between the passengers at dinner, 



Robert Louis Stevenson 299 

and the poor little grey monkeys, giving up life for a 
bad job on board that strange, heaving cage, died by 
dozens, and were flung contemptuously out into the 
ocean. The strangest voyage, however, some time 
comes to an end, and Louis landed in America. He 
was never to cross the Atlantic again ; and for those 
who loved him in Europe he had already journeyed 
more than half-way to another world. 



It is impossible to deal, however lightly, with the 
personal qualities of Robert Louis Stevenson without 
dwelling on the extreme beauty of his character. In 
looking back over the twenty years in which I knew 
him, I feel that, since he was eminently human, I ought 
to recall his faults, but I protest that I can remember 
none. Perhaps the nearest approach to a fault was a 
certain want of discretion, always founded on a wish to 
make people understand each other, but not exactly 
according to wisdom. I recollect that he once em- 
broiled me for a moment with John Addington Symonds 
in a manner altogether bloodthirsty and ridiculous, so 
that we both fell upon him and rended him. This 
little weakness is really the blackest crime I can lay to 
his charge. And on the other side, what courage, what 
love, what an indomitable spirit, what a melting pity ! 
He had none of the sordid errors of the little man 
who writes — no sick ambition, no envy of others, no 
exaggeration of the value of this ephemeral trick of 



300 Critical Kit-Kats 

scribbling. He was eager to help his fellows, ready to 
take a second place, with great difficulty offended, by 
the least shovv' of repentance perfectly appeased. 

Quite early in his career he adjusted himself to the 
inevitable sense of physical failure. He threw away 
from him all the useless impediments : he sat loosely 
in the saddle of life. Many men who get such a warn- 
ing as he got take up something to lean against ; 
according to their education or temperament, they 
support their maimed existence on religion, or on 
cynical indifference, or on some mania of the collector 
or the dilettante. Stevenson did none of these things. 
He determined to make the sanest and most genial use 
of so much of life as was left him. As any one who 
reads his books can see, he had a deep strain of 
natural religion ; but he kept it to himself; he made no 
hysterical or ostentatious use of it. 

Looking back at the past, one recalls a trait that had 
its significance, though one missed its meaning then. 
He was careful, as I have hardly known any other man 
to be, not to allow himself to be burdened by the 
weight of material things. It was quite a jest with us 
that he never acquired any possessions. In the midst 
of those who produced books, pictures, prints, bric-k- 
brac, none of these things ever stuck to Stevenson. 
There are some deep-sea creatures, the early part of 
whose life is spent dancing through the waters ; at 
length some sucker or tentacle touches a rock, adheres, 
pulls down more tentacles, until the creature is caught 
there, stationary for the remainder of its existence. 



Robert Louis Stevenson 301 



So it happens to men, and Stevenson's friends, one 
after another, caught the ground with a house, a fixed 
employment, a "stake in hfe;" he alone kept dancing 
in the free element, unattached. I remember his say- 
ing to me that if ever he had a garden he should like it 
to be empty, just a space to walk and talk in, with no 
flowers to need a gardener nor fine lawns that had to 
be mown. Just a fragment of the bare world to move 
in, that was all Stevenson asked for. And we who 
gathered possessions around us — a little library of rare 
books, a little gallery of drawings or bronzes — he 
mocked us with his goblin laughter ; it was only so 
much more luggage to carry on the march, he said, so 
much more to strain the arms and bend the back. 

Stevenson thought, as we all must think, that litera- 
ture is a delightful profession, a primrose path. I 
remember his once saying so to me, and then he 
turned, with the brimming look in his lustrous eyes 
and the tremulous smile on his lips, and added, " But 
it is not all primroses, some of it is brambly, and most 
of it uphill." He knew — no one better — how the hill 
catches the breath and how the brambles tear the face 
and hands ; but he pushed strenuously, serenely on, 
searching for new paths, struggling to get up into the 
light and air. 

One reason why it was difficult to be certain that 
Stevenson had reached his utmost in any direction was 
what I will call, for want of a better phrase, the 
energetic modesty of his nature. He was never satisfied 
with himself, yet never cast down. There are two 



302 Critical Kit-Kats 

dangers that beset the artist — the one is being pleased 
with what he has done, and the other being dejected 
with it. Stevenson, more than any other man whom I 
have known, steered the middle course. He never 
conceived that he had achieved a great success, but he 
never lost hope that by taking pains he might yet do 
so. Twelve years ago, when he was beginning to 
write that curious and fascinating book, Prince OttOy 
he wrote to me describing the mood in which one 
should go about one's work — golden words, which I 
have never forgotten. " One should strain," he said, 
''and then play, strain again, and play again. The 
strain is for us, it educates ; the play is for the reader, 
and pleases. In moments of effort one learns to do the 
easy things that people like." 

He learned that which he desired, and he gained more 
than he hoped for. He became the most exquisite 
English writer of his generation ; yet those who lived 
close to him are apt to think less of this than of the 
fact that he was the most unselfish and the most lov- 
able of human beings. 

1895. 



